In Rails - is there a rails method to convert newlines to <br>?

Question

Is there a Railsy way to convert \n to <br>?

Currently, I'm doing it like this:

mystring.gsub(/\n/, '<br>')

Answer 1

Nope. What you have there is the commonly used alternative. The definition most people use is:

   def nl2br text
       text.gsub(/\n/, '<br/>')
   end

It is named as such because it mimics the functionality of the PHP function by the same name.

Answer 2

You also might consider what you're trying to do - if you're nicely formatting text that people have entered, you might consider a filter like Markdown to let your users format their text without opening up the can of worms that is HTML. You know, like it is here at Stack Overflow.

Answer 3

You may make it more general by doing:

mystring.gsub(/(?:\n\r?|\r\n?)/, '<br>')

This way you would cover DOS, *NIX, Mac and accidental invalid line endings.

Answer 4

Yes, rails has simple_format which does exactly what you are looking for, and slightly better since it also adds paragraph tags. See

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html#M001719

Example:

 simple_format(mystring)