In PUG/JADE, how to avoid ambiguity between a variable name and a html tag?

Question

I have a code like this in pug:

var index=0
if user
    each prog in user["progress"]
      if prog.coursename === coursename
        index=blabla

However, it seems that the variable "index" was treated as a tag instead of a variable and thus caused errors. So is there any way to avoid this ambiguity?

Answer 1

With pug any time you start a line with a character/string you will output a tag of that type. As you might have seen, . and # have special meanings for class and id (respectively) and using those at the start of your line creates a plain old div .

You can escape a line to only be code with a dash at the start of your line like this:

- index = "blabla"

Note that the - operator tells pug only to evaluate the code and not to output anything. If you do want that code to output something, you need to use = or != at the start of the line.