Octopress HTML Includes with Arguments - jekyll

Question

I would like to include HTML snippets within blog posts and have the code in a single place. After perusing the framework I've been able to get this to work:
source
_includes
custom
foo.html
{% include custom/foo.html %}
My question: Is there a way that I can pass arguments to foo.html? I simply want to pass some strings in and output them in a formatted way and cannot figure out what I'm missing.
Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

You can't. But you can use some other way likes what theme does to do this.
First, set formatted style you want in custom/foo.html, for example, I add a customfooter in source/_includes/custom/footer.html:
<p>
Copyright © {{ site.time | date: "%Y" }} - {{ site.author }} -
<span class="credit">Powered by Octopress</span>
{{ site:customfooter }}
</p>
Then, set the string you want to set in _config.yml:
url: http://fann.im
customfooter: My custom footer, bala bala.
Hope this will help you.

Answer 2

There's no way to do this because Jekyll is static. By definition anything you could pass from one file to another file is a known value, because it must be defined at the time of site generation. Since you can't pass dynamic values, this sort of indirection doesn't make sense because you can just put the static value where it is going to be anyway.
If you have the use case of e.g. generating 10 chunks of output that are mostly similar but differ slightly, then use a plugin to accomplish the task of isolating those changes using variables. This gives you some flexibility while still putting the value into the template where it will be used.
Here's an example of a liquid tag that abstracts generating twitter bootstrap nav tabs with specific hrefs assigned.
module Jekyll
class XmlJsonTabsTag < Liquid::Tag
def initialize(tag_name, markup, tokens)
#methodname = markup.strip
super
end
def render(context)
#wondering what this syntax is? google "here document"
<<-HTML
<ul class="nav nav-tabs">
<li class="active">
JSON
</li>
<li>
XML
</li>
</ul>
HTML
end
end
end
Liquid::Template.register_tag('xmljsontabs', Jekyll::XmlJsonTabsTag)
Pass the value to use for #methodname in the liquid tag in the template:
{% xmljsontabs foo %}
Which outputs something like
<ul class="nav nav-tabs">
<li class="active">
JSON
</li>
<li>
XML
</li>
</ul>