The compress directive is useful for removing superfluous white-space when you use a white-space insensitive format (e.g. HTML or XML). It captures the output generated inside its body (i.e. between its start-tag and end-tag), and reduces all unbroken white-space sequences to a single white-space character. The inserted character will be a line break if the replaced sequence contains line breaks, or a space otherwise. The very first and very last unbroken white-space sequences will be completely removed.
Template
<#assignx =" moo \n\n ">
(<#compress>
1 2 3 4 5
${moo}
test only
I said, test only
</#compress>)