Rails truncate helper with link as omit text

Question

I'm quite long description that I want to truncate using truncate helper. So i'm using the:

truncate article.description, :length => 200, :omission => ' ...'

The problem is that I want to use more as a clickable link so in theory I could use this:

truncate article.description, :length => 200, :omission => "... #{link_to('[more]', articles_path(article)}"

Omission text is handled as unsafe so it's escaped. I tried to make it html_safe but it didn't work, instead of link [more] my browser is still showing the html for that link.

Is there any way to force truncate to print omission link instead of omission text?

Answer 1

I would suggest doing this on your own in a helper method, that way you'll have a little more control over the output as well:

def article_description article
  output = h truncate(article.description, length: 200, omission: '...')
  output += link_to('[more]', article_path(article)) if article.description.size > 200
  output.html_safe
end

Answer 2

With Rails 4, you can/should pass in a block for the link:

truncate("Once upon a time in a world far far away", 
  length: 10, 
  separator: ' ', 
  omission: '... ') {     
    link_to "Read more", "#" 
}

Answer 3

Dirty solution... use the method "raw" to unescape it.
you have to be sure of "sanity" of your content.

raw(truncate article.description, :length => 200, :omission => "... #{link_to('[more]', articles_path(article)}")

raw is a helper acting like html_safe .
bye

edit: is not the omission of being escaped , but the result of truncate method.

Answer 4

I encountered a similar situation and this did the trick. Try (line breaks for readability):

(truncate h(article.description), 
                  :length => 200, 
                  :omission => "... #{link_to('[more]',articles_path(article)}")
                  .html_safe

You can use h to ensure sanity of article description, and since you are setting the link_to to a path you know to not be something potentially nefarious, you can mark the resulting string as html_safe without concern.