Add String method to strip <br> tags from markdown

[thenickcox]

Currently, the docs are being compiled with the markdown parsing adding a <br> tag for every new line. This will have one of two effects. Either a) The docs are formatted with line breaks added for readability in the Markdown and the compiled HTML becomes cluttered with extraneous tags, and the layout styling is messed up, or b) The docs can be written without line breaks to preserve the intended page layout, but this creates long paragraphs, sacrificing readability.

That's not a choice we should have to make!

Excerpt of docs before this PR:

<h2><a name="application-events" class="anchor" href="#application-events"><span class="header-link"></span></a>Application Events</h2>
<p>The <code>Application</code> object raises a few events during its lifecycle, using the
<br>
<a href="./marionette.functions.html#marionettetriggermethod">Marionette.triggerMethod</a> function. These events
<br>
can be used to do additional processing of your application. For example, you
<br>
may want to pre-process some data just before initialization happens. Or you may
<br>
want to wait until your entire application is initialized to start
<br>
<code>Backbone.history</code>.</p>

After:

<h2>
  <a name="application-events" class="anchor" href="#application-events">
    <span class="header-link"></span>
  </a>
  Application Events
</h2>
<p>The <code>Application</code> object raises a few events during its lifecycle, using the
<a href="./marionette.functions.html">Marionette.triggerMethod</a>
function. These events can be used to do additional processing of your application.
For example, you may want to pre-process some data just before initialization happens.
Or you may want to wait until your entire application is initialized to start
<code>Backbone.history</code>.</p>

Closes #384.

[thenickcox]

This broke the build on the "compileAnnotatedSrc:marionette" (compileAnnotatedSrc) task, but that succeeds for me locally (as part of npm run compile-all). Any ideas?

Update

The failure is The command "./travis-runner.sh" exited with 128.. That apparently means invalid argument to exit. Not sure why my commit broke this.

Update 2

Just to see, I took out the calls to stripBrTags() in the compile-docs.js task (meaning the only change was adding the string method stripBrTags() that never gets called and thus should have no effect), and the build failed with the same exit code. I then removed the String.prototype.stripBrTags() method altogether, and the build still failed.

The builds seem to have been failing for a while, but the commit on master merging the PR that broke the build is in master, and the build succeeds. I'm super confused.

[samccone]

@thenickcox i am so sorry for the delay, mind a rebase off of master?

[thenickcox]

@samccone No problem about the delay. Although because it's been so long, I just read through this issue and the related ones to remind myself what was happening, and somehow the diff for this commit is just // test, which I'm guessing I did to force Travis to re-run. (I'm also guessing I didn't have privileges to re-run the suite from my branch or something…?) I wonder if I lost the commit that actually stripped the tags. I don't have access to the machine from which I made the commit, so I can't use git reflog or anything. I'll take another look and see what I can do here.

[samccone]

@thenickcox if you rebase off of master and repush the tests will run :)

[thenickcox]

@samccone Looking back at the discussion, I seem to recall my fix involving a regex to strip out <br> tags, which I didn't love at the time, and I dislike even more strongly now, because I don't think the marked library adds those by default. I'd love to spend some more time investigating why that's occurring, and see if maybe there's a fix for the configuration of that library or something rather than taking them out after the fact. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to get to it for a few days. If someone else commits a fix before them, more power to them! If not, I'd love to check this out.

[jdaudier]

@thenickcox Would it ok for me to close this or are you planning to work on this still?

[thenickcox]

@jdaudier Be my guest!! Thanks!

[thenickcox]

@jdaudier Oops. Misread. I thought you meant you were going to work on it. Sure, go ahead and close. Hopefully I'll get some time down the road and I'll reopen.