Once you write markup in haml, you'll do anything to avoid writing straight HTML ever again. This is an extreme example.
I needed to make a page that shows my tech-savvy users some example HTML and CSS.
So of course I wanted to use haml to render HTML that would then be escaped and whitespace preserved in a <pre> element.
First I read the reference and haml helper docs for ideas. All of these looked promising:
.. but I couldn't get them to work in concert. I unsuccessfully googled the following phrases (and many more) looking for help: haml render html in pre or code, haml plain html filter preserve white space, haml generate escaped html.
The right solution would be to contribute a new filter for haml. But here is my solution for now: I read the haml source and found the following to work. I fear it's pretty ugly.
The output, as rendered in a browser:
As you can see, it works for Sass as well. Note that %[text across lines] is short hand for the %q{} ruby literals, which is a nice way to code readable multiline strings. You need to be careful to left align that column of haml or sass (lines 4 and 11) with the preceeding variable definition to achieve proper indentation when parsed.
If you know a cleaner way to achieve this, I'd love to learn from you. I'm a relative newcomer to software development.
