Learning Rails

TagHelper

TagHelper may be of use when you want to create explicit XHTML markup using ERb templates, or want to create view logic that lets the data determine which markup is used. On the one hand, these methods are somewhat obscure; on the other, they may be exactly what you need if clean XHTML is your goal:

cdata_section

As its name suggests, the cdata_section method lets you create CDATA sections wrapping the content specified in the argument. (CDATA sections let you mark sections of an XML document as not containing any markup, so you can use <, >, and & to your heart’s content.)

content_tag

The content_tag method is a generic tag building method. You define the name of the tag, the attributes, and the content of the tag through the arguments.

escape_once

The escape_once method is extremely convenient when you have content that needs <, >, and & escaped—but you might already have done some of the escaping. This method is smart enough to escape markup text that needs escaping, while leaving the ampersands that are part of prior escaping alone.

tag

The tag method creates an empty tag (like <br />).