The capture tag is used to save content into a new variable that you can use. While similar to the assign tag, the capture tag differs where it allows you to capture multi-line content, HTML and other liquid markup within it. A helpful way to think about the capture tag would be as a detailed list that you can reference later on. Here is a non-Slate example that might help explain the capture tag:

Imagine that you have 12 Slate Sharks and you want to keep a detailed list of what you’re going to do with those Sharks:

• Count the Sharks

• Decide how many you might want to keep, or give away

• Write a message like “I have 12 Slate Sharks, but I know I want to give some away, but I must keep 2 for myself.”

You could capture all of these thoughts in one capture tag, using HTML to control the formatting:

{% capture slate-shark-information %}
<ul>
    <li>Count the Sharks</li> 
    <li>Decide how many you might want to keep, or give away</li>
    <li>Write a message like “I have 12 Slate Sharks, but I know I want to give some away, but I must keep 2 for myself.”</li>
</ul>
{% endcapture %}

After saving this content with ‘capture,’ it will be printed any time we use the merge field we designated, {{slate-shark-information}}. The HTML <ul> and <li> tags (‘unordered list’ and ‘list item’) will be preserved and print the items as a bulleted list.

How to use capture

The capture tag defines a variable which will house the content that will be stored. Any content between capture and endcapture is captured as a string and assigned to that particular variable name.

{% capture signature %}
{{User-First}} {{User-Last}}
{{User-Title}}
Slate University
{% endcapture %}

In this example we have a capture tag with a variable of ‘signature’. The tag is storing three lines of text containing User First, Last, Title and Slate University. The captured content is displayed if we use {{signature}}.