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Edit : Now it is documented

<ng-container> to the rescue

The Angular <ng-container> is a grouping element that doesn’t interfere with styles or layout because Angular doesn’t put it in the DOM.

(…)

The <ng-container> is a syntax element recognized by the Angular parser. It’s not a directive, component, class, or interface. It’s more like the curly braces in a JavaScript if-block:

  if (someCondition) {
     statement1; 
     statement2;
     statement3;
    }

Without those braces, JavaScript would only execute the first statement when you intend to conditionally execute all of them as a single block. The <ng-container> satisfies a similar need in Angular templates.

Original answer:

According to this pull request :

<ng-container> is a logical container that can be used to group nodes but is not rendered in the DOM tree as a node.

<ng-container> is rendered as an HTML comment.

so this angular template :

<div>
    <ng-container>foo</ng-container>
<div>

will produce this kind of output :

<div>
    <!--template bindings={}-->foo
<div>

So ng-container is useful when you want to conditionaly append a group of elements (ie using *ngIf="foo") in your application but don’t want to wrap them with another element.

<div>
    <ng-container *ngIf="true">
        <h2>Title</h2>
        <div>Content</div>
    </ng-container>
</div>

will then produce :

<div>
    <h2>Title</h2>
    <div>Content</div>
</div>

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