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Mold templating library

Mold is a minimalist templating library that compiles strings containing templating directives to functions that instantiate the template.

Mold's directives are surrounded by << and >>. The simplest commands are <<t EXPR>> (also <<text >>), which inserts the result of the given JavaScript expression and HTML-escapes it in the process, and <<h EXPR>> (also <<html >>) which inserts the given expression as-is, without escaping.

<p>Hello <<t $in.user>>, your score is <<t $in.score>>.</p>

Simple control flow can be performed as follows:

<ul>
  <<for x arrayEXPR>>
    <li><<if typeof x == "string">>
      <<t x>>
    <<elif x == null>>
      (missing)
    <<else>>
      <<t x.render()>>
    <</if>></li>
  <</for>>
</ul>

Inside for constructs, $i is bound to the index of the current item. A similar construct, <<for key, value in objEXPR>> can be used to iterate over object properties.

API

Mold templates are baked (precompiled) before they are instantiated. To bake a template, you need a Mold object.

var Mold = require("mold-template")
var mold = new Mold({myGlobal: "hi"})

A Mold object takes an optional scope object, whose properties are visible as variables to the code in all templates baked by that object.

It has a bake property:

var template = mold.bake("mytemplate", "hi <<t $in.name>>")
console.log(template({name: "Sue"}))
// → "hi Sue"

A baked template is a function from an input value to a string. The input value provides the $in variable inside the template. You can also unpack with an in directive:

<<in {name, score}>>
<p>Hello <<t name>>, your score is <<t score>>.</p>

in only understands plain object literals (with only property names in them) and variable names (<<in item>>), except when your JS engine supports ES6 destructuring, in which case you can use all the patterns, nesting, and defaulting that the language supports.

You can define your own directives with the defs property of a Mold object. All templates baked with bake, when a name was specified for them, are automatically available under their name. You can also add your own functions that return strings.

mold.defs.caps = function(val) { return String(val).toUpperCase() }
console.log(mold.bake("say <<caps $in>>?")("what"))
// → "say WHAT?"

Community

This software is released under an MIT license. You are invited to report bugs or submit patches via GitHub.