How to remove newlines generated by Handlebars?

Question

Suppose I have a template like the following:

start
{{#if data}}
data
{{/if}}
end

Regardless of what I pass to the template, it will always have two extra newlines:

start

data

end

Is there a way to have Handlebars not generate the newlines that the tags were occupying (without moving the tags themselves)? eg.

start
data
end

The reason why I want this is because there are cases (like in XML), where newlines are not desirable.

For example the following:

<parent>
    {{#each}}
        <child>{{.}}</child>
    {{/each}}
</parent>

Will generate

<parent>

    <child>foo</child>

    <child>bar</child>

</parent>

Collapsing the {{#each}}, {{/each}} to a single line will cause Handlebars to generate lists on a single line as well. For example, this:

 <parent>
     {{#each}}<child>{{.}}</child>{{/each}}
 </parent>

Will generate

 <parent>
     <child>foo</child><child>bar</child>    
 </parent>

So in order to generate XML without extraneous newlines, my templates end up looking something like this:

 <parent>{{#each}}
     <child>{{.}}{{/each}}
 </parent>

Thanks!

Answer 1

See this question. Try adding swung dash to the brackets, e.g., {{> partial ~}} instead of {{> partial}}, this will remove the newline. In your case, it would be:

start
{{#if data ~}}
data
{{/if ~}}
end

Which would compile to:

start 
data 
end

Answer 2

The answer given here did not work for me using express-handlebars 3.0.0. What did work was a slight variation:

{{~#each children~}}
  {{this}}
{{~/each~}}

I found this solution in this answer to a related question:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/23636497/54426