When authoring tooling that parses Handlebars files and emits Handlebars
files, you often want to preserve the **exact** formatting of the input.
The changes in this commit add a new method to the `Handlebars`
namespace: `parseWithoutProcessing`. Unlike, `Handlebars.parse` (which
will mutate the parsed AST to apply whitespace control) this method will
parse the template and return it directly (**without** processing
😉).
For example, parsing the following template:
```hbs
{{#foo}}
{{~bar~}} {{baz~}}
{{/foo}}
```
Using `Handlebars.parse`, the AST returned would have truncated the
following whitespace:
* The whitespace prior to the `{{#foo}}`
* The newline following `{{#foo}}`
* The leading whitespace before `{{~bar~}}`
* The whitespace between `{{~bar~}}` and `{{baz~}}`
* The newline after `{{baz~}}`
* The whitespace prior to the `{{/foo}}`
When `Handlebars.parse` is used from `Handlebars.precompile` or
`Handlebars.compile`, this whitespace stripping is **very** important
(these behaviors are intentional, and generally lead to better rendered
output).
When the same template is parsed with
`Handlebars.parseWithoutProcessing` none of those modifications to the
AST are made. This enables "codemod tooling" (e.g. `prettier` and
`ember-template-recast`) to preserve the **exact** initial formatting.
Prior to these changes, those tools would have to _manually_ reconstruct
the whitespace that is lost prior to emitting source.
- Handlebars.VM is actually not part of the API,
but Handlebars.VM.resolvePartial is mentioned
in the documentation and is thus now treated
as part of the API.
Closes#1534
Kabir Baidhya
Robert Jackson
Alexander Schramm
Nils Knappmeier
Andrew Leedham
Timothy Lindvall