jade template engine (under node.js): multi-line block without pipe symbol

Question

I'm currently using Jade on a new project. It seems well-suited to composing webapp layouts, but not for writing static content, such as a web page of

elements containing text.

For example, to create such a paragraph, I believe I need to do this:

p
  | This is my long,
  | multi-line
  | paragraph.

For a static web page full of real paragraphs of text, using jade becomes a burden due to that pipe symbol at the beginning of each line.

Is there some sort of syntactic sugar for marking the whole block as a text node, as the pipe symbol does on a line-by-line basis? Or an existing filter I'm unaware of?

One solution I'm exploring is the creation of a :block filter or something, that prepends each line with a | and then passes it to Jade, but jade's documentation on creating filters is sparse to say the least, so that may take a while to figure out. If anyone can provide guidance as to such a solution I'd appreciate it.

Answer 1

From the jade github page:

p.
foo asdf
asdf
 asdfasdfaf
 asdf
asd.

produces output:

<p>foo asdf
asdf
  asdfasdfaf
  asdf
asd
.
</p>

The trailing period after the p is what you're looking for.

Answer 2

After some tinkering, I worked out the details of a filter that accomplishes this. Posting the answer here since I imagine this will be useful to others using jade.

The code to create the filter turns out to be quite simple:

var jade = require ("jade");

jade.filters.text = function(block, compiler){
    return new TextBlockFilter(block).compile();
};

function TextBlockFilter(node) {
    this.node = node;
}

TextBlockFilter.prototype.__proto__ = jade.Compiler.prototype;

TextBlockFilter.prototype.visit = function(node){

    // first this is called with a node containing all the block's lines
    // as sub-nodes, with their first word interpreted as the node's name
    //
    // so here, collect all the nodes' text (including its name)
    // into a single Text node, and then visit that instead.
    // the child nodes won't be visited - we're cutting them out of the
    // parse tree

    var text = new jade.nodes.Text();
    for (var i=0; i < node.length; i++) {
        text.push (node[i].name + (node[i].text ? node[i].text[0] : ""));
    }
    this.visitNode (text);
};

And then the markup looks like this. Note that it allows you to include other jade stuff in between :text blocks:

p
  :text
    This is my first line of text,
    followed by another
    and another.  Now let's include a jade link tag:
  a(href="http://blahblah.com")
  :text
    and follow it with even more text 
    and more,
    etc