Is there a better way to hide separator when tray is empty or make separator part of tray?

[SolsticeSpectrum]

I have been using a script to hide this last slash when there are no apps present in the tray

"custom/trayslash": {
    "format": "{}",
    "exec": "echo '/'",
    "exec-if": "$HOME/.config/waybar/tray",
    "interval": 1,
    "tooltip": false
},

tray.c < -- source code for the tray checker
this hides the separator when tray is empty
is there a better way to do this?