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

Question

Is there a Railsy way to convert \\n to
?

Currently, I\'m doing it like this:

mystring.gsub(/\\n/, \'
\')


        

Answer 1

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#method-i-simple_format

Example:

 simple_format(mystring)

Note that simple_format allows basic HTML tags, but also passes text through sanitize which removes all scripts, so it should be safe for user input.

Answer 2

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.