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

The question is quite old, but I had the same problem recently. I found a simple solution: gem sanitize. It's light, works fine and has additional options if you need them.

Sanitize.clean("<b>lol</b>") #=> "lol"

Answer 2

If you don't use it very often, then you can use:

ActionView::Base.full_sanitizer.sanitize(your_html_string)

else you can define a method in test_helper.rb file like:

def strip_html_tags(string)
    ActionView::Base.full_sanitizer.sanitize(string)
end

And then in your test.rb file, use this like:

strip_html_tags(your_html_string)

Answer 3

Ideally you would require and include ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper but there are several dependencies that don't get included when you do that. You can require them yourself to be able to use strip_tags.

require 'erb'
require 'active_support'
require 'active_support/core_ext/class/attribute_accessors'
require 'active_support/core_ext/string/encoding'
require 'action_view/helpers/capture_helper'
require 'action_view/helpers/sanitize_helper'

include ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper

strip_tags("<b>lol</b>") # => "lol"

This is assuming you have rails 3 gems installed.

Answer 4

HTML::FullSanitizer.new.sanitize('<b>lol</b>') # => "lol"

Answer 5

With this example:

"&lt;p&gt;<i>example</i>&lt;/p&gt;"

This helped me:

ActionView::Base.full_sanitizer.sanitize(Nokogiri::HTML(example).text)

Output:

example

Answer 6

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("<b>lol</b>")
  end
end

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