ansaurus

Question

Rails html encoding

Answer 1

+3 A:

An apostrophe is a valid character in HTML. It is not encoded because it is not needed to be encoded.

Darin Dimitrov 2009-12-16 09:25:15

@Darin Dimitrov, thank you for your reply. So in that case is gsub("'","%27") the only approach? or is there another way?

Anand 2009-12-16 09:29:21

What you're looking for is URL-encoding, not HTML-encoding - Google led me to this: CGI::escape("Mike's Computer")

K Prime 2009-12-16 09:42:54

Darin is telling you that no further action is required.

John Topley 2009-12-16 09:43:17

@K Prime: Indeed Googling before posting this question also led me to CGI::escape , but was unsure of how to use it in a view, and thought there might be some other way of achieving the required output.

Anand 2009-12-16 09:49:47

Answer 2

+1 A:

If we look at the source code of the h method (it is an alias for html_escape), it is not that hard to just open the file and add the single quote (') to the HTML_ESCAPE constant in the file.

Below is the source code of the method with the location of the method in the file. Find the constant and and the quote in. You can even add more things inside as you want it.

HTML_ESCAPE = { '&' => '&amp;', '>' => '&gt;', '<' => '&lt;', '"' => '&quot;' }

File actionpack/lib/action_view/template_handlers/erb.rb, line 17
17:     def html_escape(s)
18:       s.to_s.gsub(/[&"><]/) { |special| HTML_ESCAPE[special] }
19:     end

CAVEAT: This modification will affect all projects that uses the library.

OR an alternative will be to create a view helper method say in ApplicationHelper

def h_with_quote(s)
  HTML_ESCAPE = { "'" => "%27"}
  h(s).gsub(/[']/) {|special| HTML_ESCAPE[special]}
end

That approach should be safer.

SamChandra 2009-12-16 10:01:01

Why would you monkey patch Rails to do something that isn't required?

John Topley 2009-12-16 10:28:22

That is why I put a caveat and an alternative answer which is not a monkey patch.I think it is an advantage of open source that you can modify the source code to solve a problem. For this case, you have a point since the alternative can be used. Thanks for pointing that out.

SamChandra 2009-12-16 12:21:36

Answer 3

+1 A:

If you want to encode a URL, use u helper:

>> fer@:~/$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.8)
>> include ERB::Util
=> Object
>> h "Mike's computer"
=> "Mike's computer"
>> u "Mike's computer"
=> "Mike%27s%20computer"
>>

FernandoFabreti 2010-10-22 16:30:23

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Rails html encoding

related questions