proposal: ability to render simple text

[adpande]

Hi,

I am trying to render simple text email using templ. But the templ block formats it and removes all blank lines. I tried using script block as well but it emits <script> tags when rendered.

It would be nice if we add a text block like:

text SimpleEmail(to string) {
Hello {to},

Welcome to our system.

Thanks,
Some Team
}

The text block will not get formatted and simply emits text after it is rendered.

Thanks,
Abhi

[joerdav]

Thanks for the proposal, I wonder what value add this has over something like:

func SimpleEmail(to string) {
    return fmt.Sprintf(`
Hello %s,

Welcome to our system.

Thanks,
Some Team
`, to)
}

Would you suggest for control flow statements such as for, switch, if to be valid? As this may be hard to parse in this context.

[adpande]

Yes, conditions , loops and expressions would be powerful. We can extent this latter even to support markdown.

[joerdav]

It may be powerful, but we need to think about how it would be even possible.

The way templ parses Go code is as follows...

It looks for a keyword at the start of a node such as for.
Then it parses the go expression up to the opening curly brace (this can be multiple lines of go code) {.
And then we continue parsing nodes until the closing curly brace }.

If it finds a keyword but then a subsequent step of parsing the statement fails, we don't assume anything, and throw an error.
By "we don't assume anything", what I mean is that if the stuff after the word for isn't valid go code, we don't fallback to it being regular text, (to avoid leaking code accidentally).

This is why in cases such as <div>for example</div>, you will see an error.
We basically say "hey, we're a bit confused here, you might have been trying to write a for loop, can you help?".
Then the dev can either fix the for loop syntax or show that they were trying to write normal text by doing <div>{for example}</div>

In the context of pure text, I'm struggling to see how we would parse it without encountering lots of errors like this.

[adpande]

Yes, I understand. I will also think. Maybe also discuss it with other collaborators.

Thanks for considering it.

[silverwind]

This seems far to error-prone for the parser and JSX also does not allow it, for comparison. What you can do in JSX is either quoted the string "foo" or unquoted inside fragements, e.g. <Fragment>foo</Fragment> or shorthand <>foo</>, both which should be much easier to parse.

[a-h]

The mission of templ is to:

Enable Go developers to build strongly typed, component-based HTML user interfaces with first-class developer tooling, and a short learning curve.

So, rendering text isn't part of the plan, but I've suggested how you can use templ to do something similar at #385 (comment)