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 spaces (there is no <br />). Maybe there are other mismatch examples, I don't know yet.

I wonder what is the most appropriate way to deal with this.

I guess that the text that is stored in the database is OK (I see for example that < is converted to <), so the main problem is the presentation.

Are there build-in helper methods in Rails for this ?

(simple_format does something that looks similar to what I need, but it adds <p> tags which I don't want to appear.)

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5852377/rails-3-how-to-display-properly-text-from-textarea

Answer 1

Since simple_format does not do what you want, I'd make a simple helper method to convert newlines to <br>s:

def nl2br(s)
  s.gsub(/
/, '<br>')
end

Then in your view you can use it like this:

<%= nl2br(h(@forum_post.message)) %>