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  3. JavaScript — Prevent Line Breaks in String Template Literals

JavaScript — Prevent Line Breaks in String Template Literals

Template literates in JavaScript are delimited with backticks and allow you to create string interpolation and multi-line strings. A multi-line string with template literals is convenient because you can add words and line breaks without concatenating strings using a + across lines. A downside of multi-line strings in template literals: it adds line breaks \n to your string value that possibly creates an unwanted result.

This tutorial shows you how to prevent line breaks in JavaScript template strings.

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Create a Single-Line String from a Multi-Line Template Literal

Let’s say you have a long string value. You want to keep this string value nicely formatted in your source code. This nicely formatted multi-line template string contains line breaks and extra spaces. Printing that string in the browser console or terminal will print out the line breaks and spaces as well:

const str = `This is a long text that can contain line breaks.  
             We can continue in a new line and keep the nice
             looking formatting. A three-line text is cool.`

console.log(str)  
// This is a long text that can contain line breaks.
//              We can continue in a new line and keep the nice
//              looking formatting. A three-line text is cool.

You can see that the printed str value looks good for the first line. The second and third lines have leading spaces and line breaks.

Escape Line Breaks Using a Carriage Return \

You can use the carriage return \ to escape selected characters. For example, you can escape an added line break (and other characters, like a $ sign). Let’s add the backslash to the end of each line to escape the line breaks:

const str = `This is a long text that can contain line breaks. \  
             We can continue in a new line and keep the nice \
             looking formatting. A three-line text is cool.`

console.log(str)  
// This is a long text that can contain line breaks.              We can continue in a new line and keep the nice              looking formatting. A three-line text is cool.

Adding the carriage return \ escapes the line breaks, but still keeps the leading spaces in the second and third lines. The leading spaces are correct because the template string is kept “as is”.

Remove Leading Spaces

You can remove the leading spaces by starting each line at position 0. This will remove the extra spaces at the beginning and print out the single-line text as wanted:

const str = `\  
This is a long text that can contain line breaks. \  
can continue in a new line and keep the nice \  
formatting. A three-line text is cool.`

console.log(str)  
// This is a long text that can contain line breaks. We can continue in a new line and keep the nice-looking formatting. A three-line text is cool.

You can also remove the extra spaces at the beginning of each line using JavaScript’s string functions. We have a dedicated tutorial on removing extra spaces from a string in JavaScript here on Future Studio.

That’s it!

Mentioned Resources

Marcus Pöhls

Marcus is a fullstack JS developer. He’s passionate about the hapi framework for Node.js and loves to build web apps and APIs. Creator of Futureflix and the “learn hapi” learning path.

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