Can anyone think of an easier way to do this?
How about using the 'highlight' helper method in your view instead?
I was just looking into Text::HTMLHighlighter....is that what you mean?
Aaron Chase wrote:
I was thinking about the one in ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper. The description is as follows:
highlight(text, phrases, highlighter = '<strong class="highlight">\1</
')
Highlights one or more phrases everywhere in text by inserting it into a highlighter string. The highlighter can be specialized by passing highlighter as a single-quoted string with \1 where the phrase is to be inserted (defaults to '<strong class="highlight">\1</strong>')
hmmmm....that looks like it might work...thanks
How do I include that Rails application. I tried just putting this in my view and it does nothing:
highlight('this is sample text', 'text')
How does rail know about it..maybe I should requiring action_view ?
Aaron Chase wrote:
It should be available in your view. I just tried adding this to my view and it worked as advertised:
<%= highlight("this is sample text", "text") %>
I'm using Rails 2.0.2.
sorry for that...I didn't even try it with the <%= at the beginning.....it does work for me too now....thanks for the help on this.
The only issue I have is that it makes the text strong bold....what I need is to make it highlighted in red or other colors....I don't see anything in the doco to do that.
I installed Text::HTMLHighlighter and all the tests ran successfully but I can't seem to figure out how to get it to work in my view. There is an .rb file that I'm supposed to call somehow and I can't figure you how to do it. The directions seem to make me think Text::HTMLHighlighter is made to work with other ruby files and not specifically for Rails...not sure...
jackster
Aaron Chase wrote:
As stated in the docs, you can specialize the highlighter by providing a value for the 3rd argument. The default is to highlight using <strong> text, but you can get the effect you want by doing something like:
<%= highlight('this is sample text', 'text', '<span class='highlight"> \1</span>') %>
and adding this to your CSS file:
.highlight {color: red}
Burning the candle at both ends, I see from the timestamp of your last
message 
You've helped me alot, Aaron...and thank you for that.
As you have pointed out...defining highlight in my CSS works perfectly. In fact, I found that as soon as I defined it, the following statement works:
<%= highlight('this is simple text', 'text') %>
And I didn't have to add the <span class = "highlight"> part although that worked as well.
The last question I have is what happens when I want to highlight more than one word if it appears in my variable?
For instance, I have a variable that contains a date, what I need to be able to do is highlight Thu when it's Thursday but always highlight 2008. This works to always highlight 2008:
<%= highlight(trap.datetime.to_s, '2008') %>
I was hoping I could do something like this but it doesn't work because it looks for both of them in a string:
<%= highlight(trap.datetime.to_s, 'Thu, 2008') %>
What I'm actually trying to accomplish here, is to highlight certain words in my network traps in red. For instance, if I got a trap that contained the word "BGP", I want that highlighted in red as well as if the word "Spanning-tree" is contained in the trap. This is why I was hoping to be able to specify several words to be highlighted if they exist in my variable.
thanks alot Aaron,
jackster
Aaron Chase wrote:
Specifying an array for the 2nd argument should do the trick:
<%= highlight(trap.datetime.to_s, ['Thu', '2008']) %>
You may have to add spaces to your phrase strings to prevent the highlighter from highlighting things you didn't intend. For example, I tried this
<%= highlight('foo bar foobar', ['foo', 'bar']) %>
and it highlighted the 'foobar' substring since 'foo' matched the first part of the string and 'bar' matched the last part of it. Changing the phrase array to ['foo ', 'bar '] (note the embedded whitespace) fixed it.
I can't thank you enough for your help on this...I'm up and running on this now and all is looking good.
jackster
Aaron Chase wrote:
Aaron....I wanted to run one more thing by you on this subject if you don't mind?
I am using the following command which works nicely to highlight key words in red if they are contained in my network trap:
<%= highlight(trap.desc4.to_s,['DOWN', 'COLD', 'BGP', 'RESTART', 'SPAN']) %>
Can you think of an easy way to highlight some words in red and others in another color?
I have never used a conditional if statement in a view before and don't even know if that's possible....if it was, I was thinking something like this might be the a solution:
if <%= highlight(trap.desc4.to_s,['DOWN', 'COLD', 'BGP', 'RESTART', 'SPAN']) %> else <%= highlight_blue(trap.desc4.to_s,['UP', 'HOT', 'OSPF', 'START', 'LINK']) %>
...or perhaps you might know of an easier solution which I am overlooking?
thanks for all the help
jackster
jackster the jackle wrote:
Just off the top of my head, you could write your own helper something like this:
def highlight_with_color(text, phrases, color_spec) highlight(text, phrases, '<span style="color:#{color_spec};">\1</
')
end
and then use it in your view like this:
<%= highlight_with_color("foo bar", ["foo, bar"], "#abcdef") %>
Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this code, but I think something like this should work. Someone in this group may also have a better suggestion...
