How can I use strip_tags in regular Ruby code (non-rails)?

Question

I need to turn HTML into plain text. There\'s a nice function that does that in ActionView\'s SanitizeHelper, but I have trouble understanding how I can reference it and use

Answer 1

ActiveSupport is the only Rails framework that supports cherry-picking individual components. The other frameworks, including ActionView, must be required en-masse:

require 'action_view'

Note that this require won't necessarily load all of ActionView. Barring situations where thread-safety requires that autoloads happen eagerly, it merely sets up autoloads and requires common dependencies. That means that following the require, if you reference, e.g. ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper, it will cause action_view/helpers /sanitize_helper.rb to be required.

Therefore the correct, supported way to accomplish what you desire using ActionView is the following:

require 'action_view'

class Test < Test::Unit::TestCase # or whatever
  include ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper

  def my_test
    assert_equal "lol", strip_tags("lol")
  end
end

This isn't well-documented; I based this answer primarily off of the discussion on this issue.