Embedding an ejs template inside of an erb template

Question

I'm building a javascript-heavy rails 3 app. It uses underscore.js, which has a very elegant templating mechanism built on top of ejs ( http://embeddedjs.com/).

The problem: embeddedjs borrows heavily from the erb syntax, so including ejs templates in an erb template causes rendering problems with the view.

Is there a way to include "non-erb" sections in an erb file? This would let me define ejs templates inside erb files. Right now I'm using a hack where I have a helper that reads the raw contents of a file containing ejs templates, and outputting that as a raw string in the erb template.

Answer 1

I use this trick to solve the problem:

// Using custom tags to be able to use regular for templates in templates
var ejs = require('ejs');
ejs.open = '{{';
ejs.close = '}}';

// Using html extension for custom ejs tags
app.register('.html', ejs);

app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
app.set('view engine', 'html');

This changes <% %> to {{ }}, and let me use <% %> for templates which are used by JS. This works for me as I don't have classic style templates (<% %>).

If you have a lot of those you may want to do the same trick but for underscore.js templates.