Taghelpers do not preserve whitespace around HTML attributes

[kirthik]

<div class =          "hey">

If I have a taghelper for div tag then my end output for the above razor code would be
<div class="hey">

Related to #123. Looks like tag helpers are not considering spaces surrounding equals.

[dougbu]

@kirthik is there a parsing issue here? Or did you expect the spaces to be preserved in the generated HTML?

Put another way, did anything fail?

[kirthik]

I was expecting spaces to be preserved in the generated HTML.

[Eilon]

Does Razor attempt to do any preservation of whitespace in a tag? E.g. if I have:

<div
    foo      =                   "bar"
baz    =
      "qux"
>whatever</div>

Won't it always render

<div foo="bar" baz="qux">whatever</div>

?

[kirthik]

Yes razor preserves white space in a tag now. We fixed that issue(#123) with this commit 08c8f9f

[Eilon]

I know we now allow it, but does it actually ever get preserved in the rendering?

[kirthik]

When I inspect html source for the razor code above, I see this

<div
     foo           =      "bar"
baz     =
     "qux"
>whatever</div>

not <div foo="bar" baz="qux">whatever</div>

[Eilon]

Well <div> probably doesn't have a tag helper on it 😄

But same thing for <a href="">...</a> I think will show the whitespace is trimmed.

I talked to @dougbu and as far as he knows all whitespace is trimmed when a tag helper is used.

This would ultimately be a feature request that we could consider in a future version.

[dougbu]

The feature would be somewhat analogous to preserving how attribute values are quoted in the .cshtml file: We'd need to extend IReadOnlyTagHelperAttribute and so on to expose information about whitespace before and after the = sign. Then RazorPage would need to do something with the extra information to generate the attribute appropriately.

Note "preserving how attribute values are quoted in the .cshtml file" is a significantly higher-value feature request we aren't even tracking at the moment. At least that one would avoid some special cases in RazorPage.

[rynowak]

No plans to do this without significant feedback