Preserving the format of text field data

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello all,

I'm still fairly new to RoR. Had a question related to a form's text field data. Given a blog model for example, with fields: title, date and body. If I were to type a full body's worth of text with line breaks and such, much like I am doing now within this message field of the post. How would I be able to preserve the original typed in format without resorting to the use of the <pre> html element within the view template or having to input data in the field using <p> and <br> html elements?

I tried to glean off any information from the "Blog in 15 mins" railscast @ rubyonrails.org, but David only posted one sentence data in each body field. So nothing much to go on there.

-Neon

2

Rails is preserving all the line breaks and so forth when the text is written to the database. But when you display this text on a web page, is in interpreted as HTML, which collapses multiple spaces to one, and ignores line breaks.

Somehow you need to get HTML tags marking up your text. My preferred way to do this is to use Textile markup for the text, and then Textile will create the HTML markup for you.

Here's an article that explains how to use Textile:

http://www.buildingwebapps.com/articles/6-easy-text-formatting-with-textile

Michael Slater www.BuildingWebApps.com www.LearningRails.com