Using kramdown in Rails 3

Question

I'm trying to add some Markdown styling to my Rails 3 blog application. This should be something simple, but I can't get it to work.

I have kramdown in my Gemfile:

gem 'kramdown'

I ran bundle install. I have an application helper called kramdown

module ApplicationHelper
  def kramdown(text)
    require 'kramdown'
    return Kramdown::Document.new(text).to_html
  end
end

And in my view script:

<%= kramdown(@post.body) %>

I'm getting the error message:

no such file to load -- kramdown

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I've just started experimenting with Kramdown.

Got it working simply by adding to gem file, bundle install, then putting the following in my view.

<%= Kramdown::Document.new(@project.body).to_html %>

Reckon your problem is the require 'kramdown' line. With Rails this is probably getting added behind the scenes. I suspect the kramdown documentation is more focused on Ruby than Rails specifically. The dev server did need restarting too.

Using your suggestion of making a helper, the following works for me.

Application helper:

def kramdown(text)
  return Kramdown::Document.new(text).to_html
end

View:

<%= kramdown @project.body %>

I did run into a problem though. All of kramdown's HTML code was visible as Rails was making the HTML safe. To solve this I added sanitize to the helper function:

def kramdown(text)
  return sanitize Kramdown::Document.new(text).to_html
end