8 Contents of a Merge Template ↑

8.4 Merge Template Variable Modifiers

There’s one last piece to the puzzle when it comes to the contents of a merge template, and that is the use of variable modifiers.

A variable modifier applies some sort of transformation to a merge template variable before it is inserted into the output from a template.

A variable modifier is generally a single character, sometimes with following attributes.

Zero to many variable modifiers may be applied to a single variable. The transformations will generally be applied in the sequence in which they are specified.

The modifiers appear after the name of the variable, and before the closing ‘$=’.

An ampersand character is used to indicate the beginning of the variable modifier(s).

Following is an example:

=$body&o$=

In this case the variable modifier of ‘o’ indicates that the body field value of each Note should be converted from Markdown to HTML.

Here’s another example:

<?output "=$title&f$=.html"?>

In this case the variable modifier of ‘f’ is used to transform the title of each Note into a conventional, universal file name, replacing spaces with dashes and converting upper-case letters to lower-case.

The Notenik Knowledge Base contains a complete list of all available variable modifiers.