Haml: Control whitespace around text

In my Rails template, I'd like to accomplish final HTML to this effect using HAML:

I will first <a href="http://example.com">link somewhere</a>, then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

The template that comes close:

I will first
= link_to 'link somewhere', 'http://example.com'
- if @condition
  , then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

You may, however, note that this produces a space between the link and the comma. Is there any practical way to avoid this whitespace? I know there's syntax to remove whitespace around tags, but can this same syntax be applied to just text? I really don't like the solution of extra markup to accomplish this.

Solution 1:

A better way to do this has been introduced via Haml's helpers:

surround

= surround '(', ')' do
  %a{:href => "food"} chicken

(<a href='food'>chicken</a>)

succeed:

click
= succeed '.' do
  %a{:href=>"thing"} here

click
<a href='thing'>here</a>.

precede:

= precede '*' do
  %span.small Not really

*<span class='small'>Not really</span>

To answer the original question:

I will first
= succeed ',' do
  = link_to 'link somewhere', 'http://example.com'
- if @condition
  then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

I will first
<a href="http://example.com">link somewhere</a>,
then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

Solution 2:

You can also do this using Haml's "trim whitespace" modifier. Inserting > after a Haml declaration will prevent whitespace from being added around it:

I will first
%a{:href => 'http://example.com'}> link somewhere
- if @condition
  , then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

produces:

I will first<a href='http://example.com'>link somewhere</a>, then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

However, as you can see, the > modifier also strips the whitespace in front of the link, removing the desired space between the words and the link. I haven't figured a pretty way around this yet, except to add   to the end of "I will first", like so:

I will first 
%a{:href => 'http://example.com'}> link somewhere
- if @condition
  , then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

Which finally produces the desired output without lots of hard-to-read interpolation:

I will first&nbsp;<span><a href="http://example.com">link somewhere</a></span>, then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met