Suggestion: Add ComponentToString and ComponentToBytes

[JosueAD95]

Hello,

I was working in a personal project that use gorilla Websockets. I decided to update the project to use templ, I was using the function WriteMessage that receive a slice of bytes. I started searching a way to get a []bytes for a Component and the closes I got was the function ToGoHTML, I knew I can convert template.HTML to a string and them to []bytes. After that, I saw the code of the function and release that from the buffer I can get []bytes without getting a template.HTML first and I implemented the function in my Project.

I thought I could be helpful to have a function that converts a templ.Component to a string and other one that do the same just to a []bytes. I would like created a PR with this two functions, basically those will be similar to the ToGoHTML implementation. Please let me know what do you think.

Kind regards

[TAR5]

Yes, it would be really useful if the templ.Component implemented the .String() method.

My usecase would be this:
<div data-my-attr={ myComponent.String() }></div>
(I want to use the rendered component as an attribute value)

Afaik there is no out-of-the-box way to do this.

[joerdav]

I don't think we would add String() string to templ.Component as that would cause other peoples custom components to no longer be valid, I also think it is powerful for the interface to be a single function interface.

For now I would recommend writing a ToString function of your own, rather than it being a build in function.

func TemplString(t templ.Component) (string, error) {
    var b bytes.Buffer
    if err := t.Render(context.Background(), &b); err != nil {
        return "", err
    }
    return b.String(), nil
}

<div data-my-attr={ TemplString(myComponent) }></div>