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.
These allow for a given block to be wrapped in helper methods or metadata and allow for more control over the current container and method before the code is run.
This allows for failover for missing partials as well as limited templating ability through the `{{> @partial-block }}` partial special case.
Partial fix for #1018
This allows us to avoid creating unnecessary AST nodes and avoids things like isHelper.
Side effect of these changes is that @data functions can now have data parameters passed to them.
Avoids parsing against SubExpressions and instead inlines the content that a subexpression otherwise would have. This can still be based via duck typing so should not add much overhead to the compiler.
Rather than keeping state in the AST, which requires some gymnastics, we create a separate visitor flow which does the top down iteration necessary to calculate all of the state needed for proper whitespace control evaluation.
Robert Jackson
Nils Knappmeier
Anders D. Johnson
kpdecker