I have a textarea field where users can enter content. When it comes to displaying their entry on a page, rails returns \n
for each line break, which appears as no break at all for html on the page.
From what I gather, the standard way of getting around this is a .gsub
command, replacing \n
with <br />
, and then a .html_safe
on the end to ensure the <br />
renders.
The problem is, I don't want to html_safe the content - html should still be replaced, but <br />
tags should be injected into the (non-escaped) content.
Suggestions appreciated.
The simple_format
method is good for formatting line breaks. It wraps text blocks in <p>
tags, and converts newline characters into line breaks (<br>
) (double newlines breaks the following text into a second paragraph).
It doesn't however escape other html characters, and instead just allows them. For what you're after a combination of simple_format
along with sanitize should do nicely. Try using this:
<%=raw sanitize(simple_format(@article.body), :tags => %w(br p) ) %>
If you want HTML tags entered in the text area visible, but still want line breaks to show, try this:
<%= simple_format(h @article.body) %>
The "h" quotes all the HTML special chars and "simple_format" then converts the line breaks to <br>.
Depending on what you want to do, you can store the \n
as it is, and then, when displaying the content on screen, use (h @comment.content).gsub("\n", '<br>')
, which is to first escape all HTML tags, and then replace the \n
with the <br>
All this can be avoided by using <pre>
tags. This has the advantage of preserving tabbing as well. eg
<pre><%= @article.body %></pre>