Learning Rails

TextHelper

The TextHelper methods offer a variety of tools for formatting, manipulating, and presenting plain text. If you’re building blogs or other software where users are entering content, this class is worth a close look:

auto_link

The auto_link method is a simple way to make links live without requiring people to use HTML. Its first argument is a block of text. By default, it will turn all URLs and email addresses in that text into live links. The link parameter defaults to :all, but also accepts :email_addresses and :urls as options if you just want one or the other. The href_options parameter lets you add attributes.

(If you want to get really fancy, you can supply a block of code that will be executed for every link that gets added, letting you control processing precisely.)

concat

Used for those obscure times when you want to generate output inside of a <% %> ERb code block instead of the usual <%= %> block.

cycle

Creates an object that lets you alternate different values for each member of an array. This lets you do things like alternate formatting to reflect even and odd rows, or mark every 10th element.

excerpt

Finds a given phrase in a given text and returns the phrase with surrounding context.

highlight

Finds a given phrase in a given text and marks all occurrences with <strong class="highlight" >.

markdown

When used with the BlueCloth plug-in (http://www.deveiate.org/projects/BlueCloth), lets you convert text containing Markdown codes (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax ...