mustache#

An extension of the mustache text template engine for .NET.

Download using NuGet: mustache#

Overview

Generating text has always been a chore. Either you're concatenating strings like a mad man or you're getting fancy with StringBuilder. Either way, the logic for conditionally including values or looping over a collection really obscures the intention of the code. A more declarative approach would improve your code big time. Hey, that's why server-side scripting got popular in the first place, right?

mustache is a really simple tool for generating text. .NET developers already had access to String.Format to accomplish pretty much the same thing. The only problem was that String.Format used indexes for placeholders: Hello, {0}!!!. mustache let you use meaningful names for placeholders: Hello, {{name}}!!!.

mustache is a logic-less text generator. However, almost every time I've ever needed to generate text, I needed to turn some of it on or off, depending on a value. Not having the ability to turn things off usually meant going back to building my text in parts.

Introducing handlebars.js. If you've needed to generate any HTML templates, handlebars.js is a really awesome tool. Not only does it support an if and each tag, it lets you define your own tags! It also makes it easy to reference nested values {{Customer.Address.ZipCode}}.

mustache# brings the power of handlebars.js to .NET and then takes it a little bit further. Not only does it support the same tags, it also handles whitespace intelligently. mustache# will automatically remove lines that contain nothing but whitespace and tags. This allows you to make text templates that are easy to read.

Hello, {{Customer.Name}}

{{#with Order}}
{{#if LineItems}}
Here is a summary of your previous order:

{{#each LineItems}}
    {{ProductName}}: {{UnitPrice:C}} x {{Quantity}}
{{/each}}

Your total was {{Total:C}}.
{{#else}}
You do not have any recent purchases.
{{/if}}
{{/with}}

Most of the lines in the previous example will never appear in the final output. This allows you to use mustache# to write templates for normal text, not just HTML/XML.

Placeholders

The placeholders can be any valid identifier. These map to the property names in your classes.

Formatting Placeholders

Each format item takes the following form and consists of the following components:

{{identifier[,alignment][:formatString]}}

The matching braces are required. The alignment and the format strings are optional and match the syntax accepted by String.Format. Refer to String.Format's documentation to learn more about the standard and custom format strings.

The 'if' tag

The 'each' tag

The 'with' tag