escape HTML output but no line-breaks

Question

I have a description text field in my Model. No I want to add this description on the show page. But the text renders ugly because of no linebreaks.

If i replace them with <br/> then the rails escape them with. So i tried to use the raw() method. I want to escape bad HTML but have the linebreaks in my output.

I end up with some ugly code.

raw(h(@place.description.gsub("\n","#linebreak#")).gsub("#linebreak#","<br/>"))

Do you have any suggestions?

Answer 1

you should use the simple_format helper:

<%= simple_format @place.description %>

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html#method-i-simple_format

Answer 2

3 years later, but it's never too late to provide a good working solution

This will escape all HTML chars but the newlines (compatible Linux, Windows and Mac)

html_escape(@place.description).gsub(/(?:\n\r?|\r\n?)/, '<br />').html_safe