Rails3 and safe nl2br !

Question

I have a system for the users to be able to post comments.

The comments are grasped into a textarea.

My problem is to format the comments with br tag to replace

Answer 1

The best way I can figure to go about this is using the sanitize method to strip all but the BR tag we want.

Assume that we have @var with the content "some\ntext":

Trying <%= @var.gsub(/\n/, '
') %> doesn't work.

Trying <%= h @var.gsub(/\n/, '
').html_safe %> doesn't work and is unsafe.

Trying <%= sanitize(@var.gsub(/\n/, '
'), :tags => %w(br) %> WORKS.

I haven't tested this very well, but it allows the BR tag to work, and replaced a dummy script alert I added with white space, so it seems to be doing its job. If anyone else has an idea or can say if this is a safe solution, please do.

Update:

Another idea suggested by Jose Valim:

<%= h(@var).gsub(/\n/, '
') %> Works