Shiny nesting a link within a paragraph has unwanted whitespace

Question

I'm building a Shiny app with some dynamically generated HTML which includes a link in mid-sentence. Unfortunately if I use the tags functions to do this, every element has a space around it whether I want it or not.

For example, if I wanted to write

This is my favorite link ever!

One might think you could do this

p('This is my ', a(href = 'https://stackoverflow.com/', 'favorite link ever'), '!')

But this results in each element being on a separate line, which by the HTML spec means there will be a space rendered between each.

<p>
  This is my 
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/">favorite link ever</a>
  !
</p>

Which looks like this (note the space before the exclamation mark)

This is my favorite link ever !

Do I have to resort to using HTML(paste0(...)) to construct my HTML, or is there some technique to using the tags functions that I'm missing?

Thanks..

Answer 1

This has been resolved by a new feature, a parameter called .noWS. Quoting Carson Sievert:

you can now do:

p('This is my ', a(href = 'https://stackoverflow.com/', 'favorite link ever', .noWS = "outside"), '!', .noWS = c("after-begin", "before-end")) 

which yields

<p>This is my <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/">favorite link ever</a>!</p>

More information on the .noWS parameter can be found at the pull request.