jeff wrote:
>
> As I understand it, escaping the $ char is context sensitive. i.e.
> \$foo will render as $foo if $foo is defined but as \$foo if foo is
> undefined. To me this seems very unfortunate. Suppose I want to create
> a template fragment for use in many different templates which needs to
> render a literal $foo. This is impossible since I can never be sure
> whether or not foo will be defined and so I won't know whether to put
> \$foo or $foo in the fragment.
>
> Now this is not a huge problem, but it seems like an unnecessary one.
> Why were escapes designed to work this way?
As I recall, the main point was that we don't want to have people modify
their input content unnecessarily just because we decided that '$' is
the start of our reference. It's a trade off, but since vel is general
purpose, we don't assume that each template is hand crafted by a
designer - you could take random stuff, such as a news feed, add some
VTL somewhere (such as search for stock tickers and put a link to your
quote page...) and run through the template engine, and it should do no
harm to the material you didn't touch.
Could you use #if() ? #if($foo) -> false if $foo not in the context.
Or
#set($blarg123 = '$foo' )
$blarg123
should work too... Of course, you then have to worry about 'blarg123'
in your context...
I understand your problem, but I hope you can see some of the
reasoning. Any suggestions?
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Velocity : it's not just a good idea. It should be the law.
http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity
