The TextHelper
methods offer a variety of tools for formatting,
manipulating, and presenting plain text. If you’re building blogs or
other software where users are entering content, this class is worth a
close look:
auto_link
The auto_link
method
is a simple way to make links live without requiring people to use
HTML. Its first argument is a block of text. By default, it will
turn all URLs and email addresses in that text into live links.
The link
parameter defaults to
:all
, but also accepts :email_addresses
and :urls
as options if you just want one or
the other. The href_options
parameter lets you add attributes.
(If you want to get really fancy, you can supply a block of code that will be executed for every link that gets added, letting you control processing precisely.)
concat
Used for those obscure times when you want to generate
output inside of a <% %>
ERb code block instead of the usual <%= %>
block.
cycle
Creates an object that lets you alternate different values for each member of an array. This lets you do things like alternate formatting to reflect even and odd rows, or mark every 10th element.
excerpt
Finds a given phrase in a given text and returns the phrase with surrounding context.
highlight
Finds a given phrase in a given text and marks all
occurrences with <strong
class="highlight" >
.
markdown
When used with the BlueCloth plug-in (http://www.deveiate.org/projects/BlueCloth), lets you convert text containing Markdown codes (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) into HTML.
pluralize
Lets you apply Rails’ inflector (the same code that manages singular and plural for ActiveRecord objects) to any text you’d like.
reset_cycle
simple_format
textilize
When used with the RedCloth plug-in (http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/), lets
you convert text containing Textilize
codes (http://www.textism.com/tools/textile) into
HTML.
textilize_without_paragraph
Just like textilize
,
but with one fewer surrounding paragraph mark (<p>...</p>
).
truncate
Cuts off the end of a string after a specified number of
characters and adds a truncate string, usually ...
.
word_wrap
Wraps text to a specified line width, breaking on whitespace when possible.