Haml advertises itself as offering a haiku for HTML; that might mean it is short, beautiful and expressive or it could mean it is enigmatic, unsatisfying and cryptic. After a period away I have forgotten how Ruby-centric Haml is. If you want to include parameters in a Haml template within Sinatra you need to bind a map to the parameter locals.
haml :index, :locals => {:hello => “World”}
The easiest way to then include the data within a tag seems to be to use Ruby string interpolation
%p= “Hello #{locals[:hello]}”
There may be more elegant ways to do this but it seems relatively idiomatic. It is just hard to adjust to after months working on very restrictive templating systems.
Echo One 
you can use it without the locals hash in haml:
define it:
haml :index, :locals => {:info_text => “World”}
use it:
%p= “Hello #{info_text}”
@Arno.Nyhm – that appears to work only sometimes; I had to change it back to “#{locals[:name]}” in order to get it to work so I’d just avoid doing it the way you suggested.
Thanks for this, though it didn’t work for me. What did was:
set :haml, :locals => {:info_text => “World”}
Then in haml, I could either quote it with #{} or just evaluate it like this:
%p= info_text
So if the variable is a whole paragraph, that works a bit better, I think.