How do I use UTF-8 entities in a Rails view?

Question

Rails appears to be converting the ampersand at the beginning of the utf-8 entity to an HTML entity: &

So ▲ becomes ▲ but I would like to display a downward arrow instead, which is what the utf-8 entity would normally be.

I'm using Rails 2.3.8 and Ruby 1.8.7.

Here is what the view looks like:

<%= get_arrow_from_helper(order) %>

And here is what the helper looks like:

def get_arrow_from_helper(order)
    arrow = order == "ASC" ? "▲" : "▼"
    html = "<div>#{arrow}</div>"
    return html
end

Answer 1

Which Rails version are you using? If you are using Rails 3 (or rails_xss plugin), Rails will escape the content by default to prevent XSS injection.

<%= "Copyright &copy; 2010" %>

will print out

Copyright © 2010

There are several ways:

1. use the raw helper, but only if you are sure the content you are printing comes from a safe source.

   <%= raw "Copyright &copy; 2010" %>
   

2. mark the string as safe, but only if you are sure the string is really safe

   <%= "Copyright &copy; 2010".html_safe %>