Rookie with text editing

Rails
1

Greetings,

This might be a pretty basic question not even totally rails specific,
but how do I control text editing using ruby on rails?

For instance, I am using the ruby forum
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/new as I type this and am typing into a
textarea tag. I have this in my rails app and I want to know how to
save the formatting - such as when I hit returns to go to a new line
when I write.

When I do it with the rails site I am working on, it ignores the returns
etc. and jumbles it all together.

Thanks,

Jason

2

Just for debugging, output the text you are getting within a set of

 tags. Web browsers are designed to ignore whitespace, and

only follow formatting specified to them in markup rules.


For a VERY simple way of at least getting the spacing right, either on

save or when display the string, replace all instances of ‘\n’ with

‘
’.


Example (in your view):

<%= @myObj.text_area_value.tr ‘\n’, ‘
’ %>


-Will



























3






Jason


When people enter text in a text area, they expect the result to look

like what they entered with proper line breaks, and indentations.


Problem:


    

  • With plain text display + gsub(/\n/,‘
    ’), you loose the
    
indentation, but the line is correctly wrapped if it’s too long.
    • 

  • With 
    , line breaks and indentations work fine, but there is no
    
wrapping (1 paragraph → 1 very long flat line).
    
(I think CSS3 will bring wrapping to 
    )
    

    • 



The simplest solution I’ve found is an HTML editor.


TinyMCE

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/


In a snap - 1 line - you tell it to HTML-empower all your textAreas, or

only the one with a given class, and voilà .

Note: I started using it yesterday so I can’t tell you much about its

limitations yet.


Alain