Re: Conditional newline in pretty format

[Robert Dailey <rcdailey.lists@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 10:28 AM Robert Dailey <rcdailey.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have the following alias:
>
> ```
> [alias]
>     release-notes = log --no-merges --pretty=format:'* %s%n%n%w(100,2,2)%b'
> ```
>
> With a branch `topic` checked out, I run it like so:
>
>     $ git release-notes origin..
>
> This gives me the "release notes" on my branch. The goal is to have it
> formatted as a bullet-point list in markdown format so I can just copy
> & paste this output into Github, Bitbucket, or other sites and have it
> already set up for render correctly.
>
> It works perfectly right now except for the case where `%b` is empty.
> In that case, I just want one newline after `%s` instead of 2. Is
> there a way to make my second `%n` conditional on `%b` having a value?

Apologies, I forgot to add a lot more detail. First, I have two
attachments. The first one, `alias1.png`, shows what log output looks
like when I execute the command mentioned above. The red annotation
box in the image points out the superfluous newlines in the entry that
has no log body (only subject). This is the newline I'm trying to get
rid of.

Another solution I tried is `%+b`, based on this documentation:

> If you add a + (plus sign) after '%' of a placeholder, a line-feed is inserted
> immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands
> to a non-empty string.

However, the output I get is not as expected. Instead of a newline
character, it appears to just insert a single space character. Observe
the result in attachment named `alias2.png`. I'm not sure if this is a
bug or if I'm just doing it wrong. Again, any help is greatly
appreciated.

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