Html escaping in a Rails 3 view

Question

I'm using Rails 3. I want to display generated html fragment inside erb template

<%= "<div>Foo Bar</div>" %>

Rails encodes div tags.

If I'm correct in Rails 2 <%=h causes html escaping. Seems that it was changed in Rails 3. How can insert html fragment without encoding in Rails 3?

Regards, Alexey.

Answer 1

I assume by encoding you mean the html-escaping:

To put out raw html in Rails 3 you can use three different approaches.

1. your can use the raw helper to output raw html

   <% some_string = "<div>Hello World!</div>" %>
   <%= some_string %>
   <!-- outputs: &lt;div&gt;Hello Worlds!&lt;/div&gt; -->
   <%=raw some_string %>
   <!-- outputs: <div>Hello Worlds!</div> -->
   

   more information: ActionView::Helpers::OutputSafetyHelper#raw

2. You can mark the string as html_safe

   <% some_string = "<div>Hello World!</div>".html_safe %>
   <%= some_string %>
   <!-- outputs: <div>Hello World!</div> -->
   

   more information: String#html_safe and ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer#new

3. You can sanitize your output with sanitize

   <%=sanitize "<div>Hello World!</div>", tags: %w( div ) %>
   

   more information: ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper#sanitze

Some more Information:

• SafeBuffers and Rails 3.0
• Railscast #204: XSS Protection in Rails 3