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Asked: 2026-05-28T14:26:44+00:00

I’m using backbone’s underscore templating engine with the mustache formatting patterns. I have already

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I’m using backbone’s underscore templating engine with the mustache formatting patterns.

I have already been successfully using it elsewhere in the project but now for the first time I’m using the looping list patterns from mustache to populate the template which is throwing an error which I’m a bit baffled by.
The error in chrome is:

"Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL"

and points to underscore’s template function in the backtrace, which is pretty useless but in firebug i get a more helpful error like this:

enter image description here

Suggesting that the hash symbol ‘#’ is the issue, which would make sense as I know that mustache is working ok as there are many other parts of the project using it well, also this is the first time I’m using the hash sybol in my templates.It looks like a problem either with the looping feature or with the interpolation/template settings for underscore.

Here’s the relevant piece of my template:

<div class="thumblist thumblistleft" id="currentprojectslist">
    <div class="thumb-list-header">
         <h2>current projects</h2>
    </div>
    <div class="thumb-list-area">
        <ol>
        {{#worklist}}       <!----- LOOK HERE --->
            {{#current}}
              <li><a>{{title}}</a></li>
            {{/current}}
        {{/worklist}}
        </ol>
    </div>
</div>

and here’s a sample of the JSON (which all validates fine)

{blah blah blah lot in here before,"worklist":[{"thumb":"img/project-s.jpg","id":"340","title":"Test Project One","desc":"big load of content here","current":true}], and so on....}

I was initially following this example here for reference:
http://mustache.github.com/#demo

NOW HERES WHERE I THINK THE PROBLEM MIGHT BE:

underscore.js suggests using this before rendering a mustache template:

_.templateSettings = {
     evaluate : /\{\[([\s\S]+?)\]\}/g,
     interpolate : /\{\{([\s\S]+?)\}\}/g
};

also:

interpolate : /\{\{(.+?)\}\}/g

Also just the interpolate statement, ive tried both. However my regex knowledge is really poor and I have a feeling it might not accomodate the hash? At any rate…. I’m totally stumped.
Can someone help me out here?

is it even possible to loop like this? looking at underscore source i’m not sure:
http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.html#section-120

Thanks very much

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m posting for the sakes of anyone else facing this issue.
    After a lot of googling to no avail, i went through the underscore.js source with a fine toothed comb and basically you have to either use underscore’s template syntax, writein ugly function processors into your JSON or include mustache.js into your source and call:

    Mustache.render(mytemplate,mymodel)

    and foresake underscore’s 

    _.template(..) function

    Annoying but whatever, I hope that helps someone

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