Whitespace

In general, all whitespace before, between and after any token is stripped away. The two following examples produce exactly the same output:

#section
field:a field's value
field:
-item

... is exactly equal to ...

  #       section
    field   :   a field's value
    field:
        -    item

The only exception to this is the value of an embed. All whitespace - leading, trailing and empty lines - inside an embed is always kept.

This embed holds the value "The Value":

-- my_embed
The Value
-- my_embed

This embed however produces the result "\n The Value\n"

-- my_embed

  The Value

-- my_embed

Expressing keys/values with leading/trailing whitespace

In the rare case this is needed (outside of embed values, which support this), one can use any custom syntax to mark the begin and end of a key/value, e.g. using quotes as other languages do it for strings, and then removing these extra characters in processing:

# " section "

" key ": " value "

Strong emphasis here that the above is not a language feature of eno but just an arbitrary example of how whitespace can be expressed - you might as well use single quotes or pipe characters or anything else, to eno it's just characters in a key or value with no special significance!

Note that using eno's escaping (which is a native language feature) does not allow you to express leading/trailing or pure whitespace in keys, the outer spacing in an escape sequence allows to express an ambiguous case of escaping an escape sequence but is always trimmed away:

`` my_name ``: my value 
`` `my_name` ``: my value 

Here the resulting key is 'my_name' in the first and '`my_name`' in the second example.