BEARD
-----

Beard is a mustache inspired template solution for Erlang. It was a created
due to mustache.erl being too slow for the authors needs.

Beard takes two files, a logic file and a template file, and turns them into
an Erlang module with a render/1 function.

Beard is suitable if you have complex templates with lots of data. We have
converted some heavy yaws pages to beard templates with no noticable
performance impact at all.

For smaller templates, the more feature rich, but also slower, mustache.erl
might be a better choice.

SYNTAX
-------
There are two constructs in beard, the {{call}} construct and the
{{#subcontext}} {{/endofsubcontext}} construct.

{{name}} will be replaced by whatever LogicModule:name(Context) returns.
Note that beard does not automatically escape output, nor convert it to
strings.

{{#persons}} will call LogicModule:subcontext(persons) and returns a list
if subcontexts. The subtemplate will be rendered with each subcontext in the
list.

EXAMPLE
-------
The following example illustrates how beard is used (with a logic file
example, and a template file example.txt):

example:
    -module(example).
    -export([render/1]).

    count(Persons) ->
        integer_to_list(length(Persons)).

    persons(Persons) ->
        Persons.

    name({Name, _Age}) ->
        Name.

    age({_Name, Age}) ->
        integer_to_list(Age).
        

example.txt:
  Hi!
  I have {{count}} friends.
  {{#persons}}
    {{name}} is {{age}} years old.
  {{/persons}}

And here is how you compile and render the template with beard:
$ erl
$> beard:compile("example.txt", "example", "ebin").
$> Persons = [{"Anne", 10}, {"Joe", 8}].
$> Output = beard:render(Persons). % Persons is the context.
$> file:write_file("example.output", Output).
$> q().
$ cat example.output
  Hi!
  I have 2 friends

    Anne is 10 years old.

    Joe is 8 years old.

Note that all whitespace and linebreaks from the template are preserved.