Rails 3: How to display properly text from “textarea”?

Question

In my Rails 3 application I use textarea to let users to write a new message in a forum.

However, when the message is displayed, all newlines look like spac

Answer 1

You'll need to convert the plain text of the textarea to HTML.

At the most basic level you could run a string replacement:

 message_content.gsub! /\n/, '
'

You could also use a special format like Markdown (Ruby library: BlueCloth) or Textile (Ruby library: RedCloth).