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prettier-plugin-go-template-guard

Wraps prettier-plugin-go-template and fixes one specific bug in its output: when a Go template action ({{ if .X }}...{{ end }}) inside an HTML attribute value gets reformatted onto multiple lines, the newlines and indentation become part of the literal attribute value at render time. This breaks a lot of code assumptions causing bugs.

Before (what prettier-plugin-go-template alone produces):

This renders as value="\n \n 123\n \n " instead of value="123".

After (this plugin):

Attribute values with real text next to a template action keep their meaningful spacing (e.g. Tailwind class boundaries, "Total: 123 items" wording) — only pure indentation/formatting whitespace is collapsed. See src/fixer.js for the exact rules.

URL-valued attributes (href, src, action, formaction, and the hx-get/hx-post/hx-put/hx-delete/hx-patch/hx-push-url htmx set) are handled differently: literal whitespace is removed entirely, because a space in a URL is percent-encoded and silently changes the request. Without this, a reformatted attribute like hx-post="/accounts/36/ deactivate " requests /accounts/36/%20deactivate and 404s. Selector- and text-valued attributes (hx-target, hx-include, class, data-*, …) are not affected, since their spaces are significant.

Why this exists

prettier-plugin-go-template formats .html files containing Go text/template/html/template syntax. Like any HTML formatter, it's free to wrap long attribute values onto multiple lines for readability. That's harmless for element content, but Go's template engine renders attribute values verbatim — so a value that looks nicely indented in your editor renders with literal newlines and spaces baked into the DOM at runtime. This plugin patches that one gap without needing a fork or a patched copy of the upstream plugin.

How it works

This is a thin wrapper, not a fork. It registers a new parser, go-template-guard, whose parse step runs the entire file through a normal, nested prettier.format() call using the real prettier-plugin-go-template parser/printer (plus any other plugins you've configured — Tailwind class sorting, prettier-plugin-classnames, etc. — all forwarded through automatically), and then runs the attribute-value fixer once over that fully-formatted result.

When nothing in a file is affected by the bug, output is byte-identical to formatting with plain prettier-plugin-go-template — this plugin never changes anything beyond the specific pattern it targets.

Install

prettier and prettier-plugin-go-template are peer dependencies, not bundled — your project's existing versions are used.

Configure

In your .prettierrc.json, swap the parser value from go-template to go-template-guard in your *.html override, and add this plugin to the plugins array (its position relative to your other plugins doesn't matter — it's not itself a formatter, just a coordination layer):

goTemplateBracketSpacing and other prettier-plugin-go-template options are still respected — they're read by the real plugin during the nested inner format call, since this wrapper forwards options straight through.

Development

Tests are under test/:

• fixer.test.js covers the text-collapse logic in isolation (regex matching, whitespace collapsing, idempotency). • integration.test.js runs the actual Prettier plugin end-to-end, including a regression test for a bug caught during development where the nested format call originally dropped the caller's other configured plugins.

Limitations

• The fixer is a plain-text/regex pass over already-formatted output, not an HTML/AST parser — deliberately, since an AST parser would normalize whitespace on parse and hide the exact bug being fixed. This is fine for the attribute-value pattern it targets, but it means it doesn't understand HTML structure beyond attribute boundaries. • Adds one extra full nested prettier.format() call per file compared to using prettier-plugin-go-template directly. This is a deliberate correctness/performance tradeoff — see the comment in index.js for why.