[Resolved] best way to manipulate content template output?

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[ericE-4]

I'm trying to format the output from a content template. This template builds a string based on the values from three separate checkbox fields, appending a comma and a space after each one. I need to remove the final ", " characters.

My template looks like this:

<span id="saltwater-freshwater">
[wpv-conditional if="( $(wpcf-saltwater) = '1' )"][types field='saltwater'][/types], [/wpv-conditional]
[wpv-conditional if="( $(wpcf-freshwater-lakes) = '1' )"][types field='freshwater-lakes'][/types], [/wpv-conditional]
[wpv-conditional if="( $(wpcf-freshwater-rivers) = '1' )"][types field='freshwater-rivers'][/types], [/wpv-conditional]
</span>

and then I added some custom JS to the JS editor as follows:

var string = jQuery("#saltwater-freshwater").html();

if (string.slice (-2) == ", " ) {
    jQuery("#saltwater-freshwater").html(string.slice(0,string.length-2));
  
} else {
    jQuery("#saltwater-freshwater").html(string);
}

This works in effectively removing any final ", ", but it seems like a pretty crude way of manipulating output from a content template or a view. Is there a more efficient way of accomplishing the same thing?

[Christian Cox]

Hi, you could filter the Content Template output with PHP, but it's not much simpler: https://toolset.com/documentation/programmer-reference/views-filters/#wpv_filter_content_template_output).

A conditional-based approach would be complex, too. If I wanted to do something like this, I would also consider a CSS-based approach, where I could use a nth-child or first-of-type pseudo selector to insert a comma and space :before each element except the first one. Something like this maybe: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27836769/comma-separated-spans-with-pure-css

[ericE-4]

OK great. I was thinking there might be a built-in function, but I'll consider the css approach--that's a great idea.