Can someone tell me what the difference is between
value_template: >-
and
value_template: >
Why would I want to do one over the other or is there a best practice on which I should use?
The - is todo with stripping whitespace. 99.9% of the time in homeassistant it is an unnecessary addition (because we’re not usually formatting text for display, we’re creating a value for a key).
https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/2.11.x/templates/#whitespace-control
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That said, is it good practice to use >- instead of just > ? Is there a better/more safe route? I guess I need to pick one and just go with it so I do that everywhere and am trying to come to that conclusion - I just don’t know enough about which one is considered better and/or safer.
After reading that page, it seems like using >- is the better route to go but not sure.
Not really, you’re just putting an extra character in for no reason 
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To make things even more difficult you could also use | 
They all have different effects. You can read about them in the jinja2 documentation.
As long as you are not returning text it doesn’t really matter, as has been said.
?
I have templates that return text, I don’t use the whitespace control character, and the output doesn’t have superfluous whitespace.
The only place I see a difference is in the Template Editor.
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This mostly matters, when you return longer texts, in notifications for example, and want to controll the formatting like line breaks, etc.