In Rails - is there a rails method to convert newlines to <br>?

Question

Is there a Railsy way to convert \n to <br>?

Currently, I'm doing it like this:

mystring.gsub(/\n/, '<br>')

Answer 1

Yes, rails has simple_format which does exactly what you are looking for, and slightly better since it also adds paragraph tags. See

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

Example:

 simple_format(mystring)

Note that simple_format allows basic HTML tags, but also passes text through sanitize which removes all scripts, so it should be safe for user input.