Whitespace control

In Liquid, you can include a hyphen in your tag syntax {{-, -}}, {%-, and -%} to strip whitespace from the left or right side of a rendered tag.

Normally, even if it doesn’t print text, any line of Liquid in your template will still print a blank line in your rendered HTML:

Input

{% assign my_variable = "tomato" %}
{{ my_variable }}

Notice the blank line before “tomato” in the rendered template:

Output

tomato

By including a hyphen in your assign closing delimiter, you can strip the whitespace following it from the rendered template:

Input

{% assign my_variable = "tomato" -%}
{{ my_variable }}

Output

tomato

Avoiding whitespace using hyphens

If you don’t want any of your tags to print whitespace, as a general rule you can add hyphens to both sides of all your tags ({%- and -%}):

Input

{% assign username = "John G. Chalmers-Smith" %}
{% if username and username.size > 10 %}
  Wow, {{ username }} , you have a long name!
{% else %}
  Hello there!
{% endif %}

Output without whitespace control

  Wow, John G. Chalmers-Smith , you have a long name!

Input

{% assign username = "John G. Chalmers-Smith" -%}
{%- if username and username.size > 10 -%}
  Wow, {{ username -}} , you have a long name!
{%- else -%}
  Hello there!
{%- endif %}

Output with whitespace control

Wow, John G. Chalmers-Smith, you have a long name!

Avoiding whitespace without hyphens

If you use the liquid tag with the echo keyword, you can avoid whitespace without adding hyphens throughout the Liquid code:

{% liquid
assign username = "John G. Chalmers-Smith"
if username and username.size > 10
  echo "Wow, " | append: username | append: ", you have a long name!"
else
  echo "Hello there!"
endif
%}

Note about the Liquid docs

In the rest of the documentation, some example output text may exclude whitespace even if the corresponding input Liquid code doesn’t have any hyphens. The example output is for illustrating the effects of a given tag or filter only. It shouldn’t be treated as a precise output of the given input code.