How do I encode/decode HTML entities in Ruby?

html ruby
Kostas picture Kostas · Oct 21, 2009 · Viewed 144.9k times · Source

I am trying to decode some HTML entities, such as '&amp;lt;' becoming '<'.

I have an old gem (html_helpers) but it seems to have been abandoned twice.

Any recommendations? I will need to use it in a model.

Answer

Damien MATHIEU picture Damien MATHIEU · Oct 21, 2009

To encode the characters, you can use CGI.escapeHTML:

string = CGI.escapeHTML('test "escaping" <characters>')

To decode them, there is CGI.unescapeHTML:

CGI.unescapeHTML("test &quot;unescaping&quot; &lt;characters&gt;")

Of course, before that you need to include the CGI library:

require 'cgi'

And if you're in Rails, you don't need to use CGI to encode the string. There's the h method.

<%= h 'escaping <html>' %>

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