Multi line text

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I am storing multi-lined information in a text field in the database, and intaking it using a text_area field. When i output it, the information is all streamed into one line. How can I output the information with the line breaks.

Thanks!

2

Replace ‘\n’ with ‘
’ (or ‘
\n’) in your string when rendering it.

Cheers.

3

I define the following method in one of my helper files:

  # wraps each line to width characters, splitting lines on a whitespace character   def wrap_text(text, width = nil)     char_count = 0     0.upto(text.length) do |i|       point = i;       # reset the character counter if we encounter a newline       # before we've reached width characters       char_count = 0 if text[point..point] == "\n";       if char_count > width         # once we hit the desired width of characters, start         # moving backwards one character at a time until we         # encounter a whitespace character         point -=1 while text[point..point] != " "         text.insert(point+1, "\n")         # we've inserted a newline, reset the character counter         char_count = 0;       else         char_count+=1       end     end     return text   end

I'm sure there's an easier method for line wrapping (if anyone else has a better method, I'd love to see it). I did come across the following site earlier today, which includes a _much_ simpler method for line wrapping, although unfortunately it doesn't work:

http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/methodCheckDateSucc.html

the method is the following:

str = "Hello. Ruby rocks. " * 50 while space_pos = str.rindex(" ", 80)   str[space_pos, 1] = "\n" end

but it fails to correctly line wrap, since each call to str.rindex doesn't take into account where the previous newline character was inserted.. I just didn't want to spend any time fixing it, since I've already got a working line wrap method (albeit mine is a bit cumbersome).

Mike

4

Thanks Curtis, that's good to know.. Although I think I'll stick to my current method, as this one seems to remove lines with nothing but a line feed on them, which I often have, since I'm displaying the contents of user entered text in a <pre></pre> tag. With my method, I get pretty much exactly what the user has entered, including their empty linefeeds, but wrapped so that it doesn't extend past the width of the page.

Mike

5

Thanks for all the help! I ended up using the simple_format helper as a base, but modified it so that it didn't put <p> tags around the entire thing.

  def simple_format2(text)     text.gsub!(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/, "\n") # lets make them newlines crossplatform     text.gsub!(/\n\n+/, "\n\n") # zap dupes     text.gsub!(/\n\n/, '</p>\0<p>') # turn two newlines into paragraph     text.gsub!(/([^\n])(\n)([^\n])/, '\1\2<br />\3') # turn single newline into <br />   end

Thanks again!