Wrap long template literal line to multiline without creating a new line in the string

Question

If you introduce a line continuation (\) at the point of the newline in the literal, it won't create a newline on output:

const text = `a very long string that just continues\
and continues and continues`;
console.log(text); // a very long string that just continuesand continues and continues

This is an old one. But it came up. If you leave any spaces in the editor it will put them in there.

if
  const text = `a very long string that just continues\
  and continues and continues`;

just do the normal + symbol

if
  const text = `a very long string that just continues` +
  `and continues and continues`;

You could just eat the line breaks inside your template literal.

// Thanks to https://twitter.com/awbjs for introducing me to the idea
// here: https://esdiscuss.org/topic/multiline-template-strings-that-don-t-break-indentation

const printLongLine = continues => {
    const text = `a very long string that just ${continues}${''
                 } and ${continues} and ${continues}`;
    return text;
}
console.log(printLongLine('continues'));

Another option is to use Array.join, like so:

[
    'This is a very long string. ',
    'It just keeps going ',
    'and going ',
    'and going ',
    'and going ',
    'and going ',
    'and going ',
    'and going',
].join('')

EDIT: I've made an tiny NPM module with this utility. It works on web and in Node and I highly recommend it over the code in my below answer as it's far more robust. It also allows for preserving newlines in the result if you manually input them as \n, and provides functions for when you already use template literal tags for something else: https://github.com/iansan5653/compress-tag

---

I know I'm late to answer here, but the accepted answer still has the drawback of not allowing indents after the line break, which means you still can't write very nice-looking code just by escaping newlines.

Instead, why not use a tagged template literal function?

function noWhiteSpace(strings, ...placeholders) {
  // Build the string as normal, combining all the strings and placeholders:
  let withSpace = strings.reduce((result, string, i) => (result + placeholders[i - 1] + string));
  let withoutSpace = withSpace.replace(/\s\s+/g, ' ');
  return withoutSpace;
}

Then you can just tag any template literal you want to have line breaks in:

let myString = noWhiteSpace`This is a really long string, that needs to wrap over
    several lines. With a normal template literal you can't do that, but you can 
    use a template literal tag to allow line breaks and indents.`;

This does have the drawback of possibly having unexpected behavior if a future developer isn't used to the tagged template syntax or if you don't use a descriptive function name, but it feels like the cleanest solution for now.

Use the old and the new. Template literals are great but if you want to avoid lengthy literals so as to have compact lines of code, concatenate them and ESLint won't cause a fuss.

const text = `a very long string that just continues`
  +` and continues and continues`;
console.log(text);

Similar to Doug's answer this is accepted by my TSLint config and remains untouched by my IntelliJ auto-formatter:

const text = `a very long string that just ${
  continues
} and ${continues} and ${continues}`