How can I keep Jekyll from adding whitespace in highlight? - jekyll

Question

I'm currently experimenting with Jekyll. Most things look fine, but the way Jekyll processes code highlighting seems to be buggy.
I use pygments.
Then Jekyll seems to use pieces like:
{% highlight python %}
#!/usr/bin/env python
def wer(r, h):
"""
{% endhighlight %}
to generate code like
<div class="highlight">
<pre>
<code class="python"><span class="c">#!/usr/bin/env python</span>
<span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">wer</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">r</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">h</span><span class="p">):</span>
<span class="sd">"""</span>
<span class="sd"> Calculation of WER with Levenshtein distance.</span>
<span class="sd"> Works only for iterables up to 254 elements (uint8).</span>
<span class="sd"> O(nm) time ans space complexity.</span>
[...]
<span class="n">doctest</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">testmod</span><span class="p">()</span>
</code>
</pre>
</div>
which looks like
The problem is whitespace between code and pre:
How can I tell Jekyll not to put whitespace between those tags?
repository with my blog
a rendered example page (with this source page).
Bug hunting
My Jekyll version is jekyll 1.3.1.
With gem environment I found that my gems are at /var/lib/gems/1.9.1.
With grep -rn "highlight" --exclude-dir=site --exclude-dir=test * I found that the highlight tag gets parsed in /var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-1.3.1/lib/jekyll/tags/highlight.rb
As this might be a Jekyll bug, I've added issue 1801
Now comes the strange part: highlight.rb seems not to add any whitespace between <pre> and <code>.

Answer 1

This problem is caused by Liquid, the templating engine of Jekyll (see Issue 216 of Liquid and Issue 1806 of Jekyll).
The current (12.12.2013) answer to this question is: You cannot keep Jekyll from adding those whitespaces.
But a fix to the underlying problem is to remove the whitespaces after all pages have been compiled. I've written the following Python script to do so:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import re, fnmatch, os
def removeWhitespace(file_path):
#read file content
with open(file_path) as f:
content = f.read()
#replace whitespace
openingTag = re.compile('<pre>\s*<code', re.DOTALL)
closingTag = re.compile('</code>\s*</pre>', re.DOTALL)
if re.findall(openingTag, content):
content = re.sub(openingTag, '<pre><code', content)
content = re.sub(closingTag, '</code></pre>', content)
#write without whitespace
with open(file_path,'w') as f:
f.write(content)
# Get all HTML files
files = []
for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk('.'):
for filename in fnmatch.filter(filenames, '*.html'):
files.append(os.path.join(root, filename))
for filename in files:
removeWhitespace(filename)

Answer 2

This is stylesheet related.
I was able to build your sample page on my test environment using the default without any problem*.
Try adding the following to style.css
/* standard */
.post pre {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
background-color: #eef;
padding: 0 .4em;
}
* Only problem I had was it complained about the following line
Jekyll is a static blog generator.
Which I resolved by wrapping the line in a paragraph tag.