Implementing twitter-like hashtag on rails

Question

I'm want to implement twitter-like hashtag on my app.

Let's say I have user input to a text area "I'm coming to #london from #paris" then I want to build tag cloud of the hashtags.

I'm thinking of using acts-as-taggable-on. So I find all of my hashtags from the text in the backend, then save it to tag field.

Anyone has experience on this they would like to share? Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, ActsAsTaggableOn should be fine. As @etang alluded to, it's a heavy gem, but it gets the job done. If you're looking for a simple way to extract tags from text, you may want to look at https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-rb. It has some nice regexps that may save you some time.

Twitter::Extractor.extract_hashtags("my #favorite #site is http://foo.com/home#boo")

That would return "favorite" and "site" but not "boo" (as would be expected).