Notice the readability and balance of:
<li class='aclass anotherclass <%= maybeaconditionalclass %>'>
<a href="<%= some stuff %>">
<%= some other stuff %>
</a>
</li>
which unfortunately produces trailing whitespace inside the link resulting in a ugly trailing underline. Now although less readable I can live with this:
<li class='apossibleclass anotherclass <%= maybeaconditionalclass %>'>
<a href="<%= some stuff %>"><%= some other stuff %></a>
</li>
Still, the same problem remains if I now consider this kind of thing:
li.apossibleclass:after {
content: "/";
}
as the whitespace between the closing A and LI gets in the way of what should be sticking to my list item's end. I could only produce that ugly mess as a workaround:
<li class='apossibleclass anotherclass <%= maybeaconditionalclass %>'>
<a href="<%= some stuff %>"><%= some other stuff %></a></li>
Django came up with a nice solution: {% spaceless %}, so I'm looking for the equivalent of the {% spaceless %} tag in Rails erb templates.
Yes, that would be an useful feature, and as far as I know, there's nothing like it in Rails. So I've coded it.
# Strip all whitespace between the HTML tags in the passed block, and
# on its start and end.
def spaceless(&block)
contents = capture(&block)
# Note that string returned by +capture+ is implicitly HTML-safe,
# and this mangling does not introduce unsafe changes, so I'm just
# resetting the flag.
contents.strip.gsub(/>\s+</, '><').html_safe
end
This is a helper you can place in your application_helper.rb, and then use like this:
<%= spaceless do %>
<p>
<a href="foo/"> Foo </a>
</p>
<% end %>
... which will result in the output string like
<p><a href="foo/"> Foo </a></p>
Sadly, this only works in Rails 3. Rails 2 support for a feature like this will require some dirty hacks to ERb.