Django templates stripping spaces?

Question

I\'m having trouble with Django templates and CharField models.

So I have a model with a CharField that creates a slug that replaces spaces with underscores. If I cr

Answer 1

Slugify removes all leading spaces, you'll need to rewrite this as a custom template tag to get the behaviour you're after. The original filter code looks like this

def slugify(value):
   """
   Normalizes string, converts to lowercase, removes non-alpha characters,
   and converts spaces to hyphens.
   """
   import unicodedata
   value = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', value).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
   value = unicode(re.sub('[^\w\s-]', '', value).strip().lower())
   return mark_safe(re.sub('[-\s]+', '-', value))

which changes "some   string" into "some-string" killing the extra whitespace. You could change it like so:

def new_slugify(value):
   """
   Normalizes string, converts to lowercase, removes non-alpha characters,
   and converts spaces to hyphens, does not remove leading whitespace.
   """
   import unicodedata
   value = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', value).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
   value = unicode(re.sub('[^\w\s-]', '', value).strip().lower())
   return mark_safe(re.sub('[-\s]', '-', value))

Which will result in the following behaviour: "Some  String here" to "some--string-here"

You still might have problems as mentioned before with how html treats extra whitespace, you'd have to write another, deslugify filter.