Force a newline in rendered html markup (source formatting)?

Question

seems like a silly question but I cannot seem to find an answer and I'm wondering if I'm not just phrasing it incorrectly or using the wrong terms...

I simply want to force a newline within a loop returning content:

  <ul>
  {exp:channel:entries channel="duh"}
    <li><a href="{site_url}{url_title}/">{title}</a></li>
  {/exp:channel:entries}
  </ul>

so that the output will change from:

  <ul>
    <li><a href="/link-1/">link-1</a></li><li><a href="/link-2/">link-2</a></li><li><a href="/link-3/">link-3</a></li>[etc]
  </ul>

to:

  <ul>
    <li><a href="/link-1/">link-1</a></li>
    <li><a href="/link-2/">link-2</a></li>
    <li><a href="/link-3/">link-3</a></li>
    [etc]
  </ul>

it must be something simple that I'm missing, but I cannot find any references to making it happen in the EE docs or various searches here and elsewhere.

I thought it might be something obvious like adding a {\n} or {NEWLINE} into the mix, but no luck as of yet finding something that works.

little help please?

Answer 1

TBH, your code output is a result of your code format.

Turn this:

<ul>
{exp:channel:entries channel="duh"}
    <li><a href="{site_url}{url_title}/">{title}</a></li>
{/exp:channel:entries}
</ul>

into this:

<ul>
{exp:channel:entries channel="duh"}
    <li>
        <a href="{site_url}{url_title}/">
            {title}
        </a>
    </li>
{/exp:channel:entries}
</ul>

And all your troubles will go away. In my experience, this style of HTML/Template formatting makes for, by far, the easiest debugging during development. It also makes development itself much easier to handle, and templates much easier to read amongst developers. Once you're in production, all of your HTML should be minified anyways, but even if it isn't, a thousand carriage returns in a template aren't going to hurt your load time noticeably.

Edit

Oooo, yeah, you can't do anything about that one, to my knowledge. There is a method, however, you will hate it with a passion. Turn PHP on output for any particular template aaaaand:

<ul>
{exp:channel:entries channel="duh"}
    <li>
        <a href="{site_url}{url_title}/">
            {title}
        </a>
    </li>
    <?php echo "\r\n"; ?>
{/exp:channel:entries}
</ul>

That'll do it. The problem is that the core entries module trims and removes new lines after each loop, essentially screwing you. On PHP set to output, however, this will result in a PHP stage after the template parsing stage, so you get this:

<ul>
    ...
    <li>
        <a href="www.site.com/url-title">
            This entry's title!
        </a>
    </li><?php echo "\r\n"; ?><li>
        <a href="www.site.com/url-title">
            This next entry's title!
        </a>
    </li>
    ...
</ul>

which then gets its PHP evaled, and the result is something like this:

<ul>
    ...
    <li>
        <a href="www.site.com/url-title">
            This entry's title!
        </a>
    </li>
<li>
        <a href="www.site.com/url-title">
            This next entry's title!
        </a>
    </li>
    ...
</ul>

You can't really win too much with that last line. Unless someone else knows a secret method (other than core hacking).