Rails -- Add a line break into a text area

html ruby-on-rails textarea
ChrisWesAllen picture ChrisWesAllen · Jun 29, 2010 · Viewed 59.2k times · Source

I got a rails app where I can input a few paragraphs of text into my model. The problem is I dont know how to input any line breaks.

I've tried to add " {ln}{/ln} ; {&nbsp} and {br}{/br}" but that only displays the html as text and no break.

Is there anyway I can set it so the text area control will use any of the html I place within the model entry?

Is there any thing I can type so rails will recognize, hey put a line here?

Answer

Karl picture Karl · Jun 30, 2010

Line breaks in textareas are produced as `\n'. However, the problem is that if you simply dump it into your view, it will just be line breaks in your HTML source.

You can try using the Rails simple_format helper to take care of some of this for you: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html#M002285

It will auto-convert line breaks to HTML tags. You can use it with something like <%= simple_format(my_text_field) %>.

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