I am trying to create a snippet that gives me choices for optional attributes. I have used this approach in the past where I just put a blank space as a choice in the placeholder. That works when there is only one option between other parts of the snippet but like in the following example if I wanted to skip both placeholders (optional attributes on the adorn) there would be multiple spaces in the generated code which I would have to delete manually.
"Adorn":
"prefix": ["adorn"],
"body": [
"<%= adorn${1| , color: :blue, color: :white|}${2| , inline: true|} do |a| %>",
"\t$0",
"\t<%= a.adornment %>",
"\t\t",
"\t<% end %>",
"<% end %>"
],
"description": "An adorn"
},
From what I can see in the documentation it doesn't seem possible to do what I want using placeholders and choices. I thought I could use a variable and just have it resolve to empty string but the grammar doesn't seem to allow for that.
Is there any other way to accomplish what I am trying to do?
You can use some unicode characters in snippets, so I tried backspace (did not work) but \u200B which is a "zero-width space" does. So you can do this in your choices:
{1|\u200B, color: :blue, color: :white|}${2|\u200B, inline: true|}
and if you choose the blanks (i.e., the \u200B's) a zero-width space will be inserted. And you get what you want - no spaces to be deleted.
But I leave it to you to see if there are any parsing or other problems with having that character in your code. Maybe it is or isn't a problem in your language. See the open issue (which I found after posting this answer initially) https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/34368 ("Allow "empty" as a choice in snippets ") where the zero-width space option is warned against and may cause problems - so test it. It doesn't look like there is any other option but a regular space which you have tried.
I tried "null" \u0000 and it wasn't recognized by vscode.