Ruby on Rails® for Microsoft Developers

5.11. Adding Support for Textile

Despite having separate paragraphs in the text area for the body attribute as shown in Figure 5-17, these newlines (that is, \n) are not rendered as line breaks or new paragraphs when the template is rendered in HTML.

You could use the helper simple_format, which appends a linebreak (that is, <br />) to each newline. When two consecutive newlines are found, the text before them, and the text after them, is wrapped in two separated pairs of paragraph tags. This fixes the "wall of text" issue, but you'd still be left with the issue of safely allowing innocuous HTML tags.

Figure 5.17. Figure 5-17

The helper method santize does exactly that. It strips all the attributes that aren't explicitly allowed, while encoding the ones that are permitted. The method accepts two arguments, the HTML text that needs to be "sanitized," and a hash of options. santize can be considered as a more advanced replacement of h. If you were to adopt this strategy, simple_format and sanitize could be used together to obtain paragraph separation from newlines first, and then strip all the non-allowed tags and attributes. This approach would work but would require the blog's author to manually insert HTML.

It is customary for blog engines to provide a friendly markup language like Textile or Markdown, instead of requiring HTML code to be written. Assume that in your blog you'll ...