Question

My function parses through text, grabs parts and generates text only email format. But it also needs to generate html format.

The brain-dead way would be to use if … else … and add additional html tags around each paragraph or element. But it will violate DRY (don’t repeat yourself) rule.

Is there an elegant way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

As @Pointy said, you should look into templates. jQuery templates, while in beta, are good enough – although there are lots of alternatives for good javascript templates.

In your case, you would do something like:

$.template("textTemplate", "Hi ${name}!\n\nWelcome as a member!");
$.template("htmlTemplate", "<h1>Hi ${name}!</h1><p>Welcome as a member!</p>");

And then use them like this:

var emailText = $.tmpl("textTemplate", data);

// Show the html
$.tmpl("htmlTemplate", data).appendTo("#container");