@foreach loops can only have one parameter

[knight666]

I'm writing a personal project using Node.JS and use preprocess to generate HTML from templates. For the most part, I'm very pleased with how this has turned out: I can generate my entire website with a single grunt command. However, one issue has come up time and time again: for loops really aren't that useful.

One of my pages generates a link to each of my projects, using a styled HTML list, like this:

<ul>
    <li><a href="projects/project1.html">Project 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="projects/project1.html">Project 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="projects/project1.html">Project 1</a></li>
</ul>

The problem is that I cannot generate this list using preprocess. I can wrap the block in a @foreach loop, like so:

<ul>
<!-- @foreach $PROJECT in PROJECTS_LIST -->
    <li><a href="projects/project1.html"><!-- @echo $PROJECT --></a></li>
<!-- @endfor -->
</ul>

But I think you can already spot the problem: I need a parameter for both the link and the project title and I can only ever have one. There are no string splitting functions in the syntax, so I can't even hack in a second parameter by splitting a string on a predetermined character. So I end up writing code like this:

// Grunt task

project_list.forEach(function(project) {
    context['PROJECT_LIST'] += '<li><a href="projects/' + project.link + '">' + project.link + '</a></li>\n';
});

// Template

<ul>
    <!-- @echo PROJECT_LIST -->
</ul>

This works, but this basically means the @foreach has no use for my project. In my opinion, the loop could be more useful if it supported syntax like this:

<ul>
<!-- @for { $LINK, $TITLE } in PROJECTS_LIST -->
    <li><a href="projects/<!-- @echo $LINK -->"><!-- @echo $PROJECT --></a></li>
<!-- @endfor -->
</ul>

In order to keep the syntax sane and prevent the module from growing into a full-blown scripting language, I would add the requirement that the iterated values can only be strings or numbers, not lists or objects.

[shushenghong]

+1, need simple loop support in origin html source