# Extending Bluecloth/Redcloth **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [April 10, 2008, 3:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/extending-bluecloth-redcloth/134404 "2008-04-10T15:39:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/spiderware)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2008, 3:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/extending-bluecloth-redcloth/134404/1 "2008-04-10T15:39:04Z")
I’d like to extend bleucloth or redcloth to support custom tags, e.g. I want to use markup like this: [pubmed:18332676] which shall be extended to: [Behav Pharmacol. 2008 Mar;19(2):121-128.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18332676) Does anyone know, if this is possible and has some hints how to do this?! I have not decided, wether I want to use redcloth or bluecloth, I’ll take, whatever has the better extensibility… Cheers&thx for any help Stefan ---
**Author:** ![spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/spiderware)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2008, 4:19pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/extending-bluecloth-redcloth/134404/2 "2008-04-10T16:19:53Z")
I realize that it might be a pain to incorporate _another_ mark up language, but your syntax is very much like BBCode, and there is a rails plugin for BBCode that allows easy customization of what tags/ replacements should be made to your text. [http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/bbcodeizer](http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/bbcodeizer) Quick and easy, if you don’t mind calling another function when you render. If you want it saved directly into the db as the link, then you could make a simple before\_save callback that regexed the tag into html… though I don’t know how you would get the study/publisher information to include in the tag from just the ID. Good luck! On Apr 10, 9:39 am, Stefan F. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/spiderware)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2008, 4:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/extending-bluecloth-redcloth/134404/3 "2008-04-10T16:33:35Z")
This looks _almost_ like the thing I wanted: Unfortunately, the replacement is a little more complex than what bbcodeize offers: Instead of replacing the tag with a strin, I need to call a function, which queries pubmed with the given id and fetches study/publisher info. Preferably, I wanted to do this at render-time: If I place it in a before\_save, I either: (a) have another field for the processed markup (b) or find a way to undo the replacement for editing. as (b) looks really ugly, I guess I will try a simple regex for extracting the [pubmed:…]-tag - and store the results of the processing in another field… thx for the help! ---
**Author:** ![spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/spiderware)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2008, 8:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/extending-bluecloth-redcloth/134404/4 "2008-04-10T20:20:51Z")
Stephan, I’d like to extend bleucloth or redcloth to support custom tags, e.g. I > want to use markup like this: see: [http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-custom-textile](http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-custom-textile) Google is your friend. Alain ---
**Author:** ![spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/spiderware)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2008, 5:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/extending-bluecloth-redcloth/134404/5 "2008-04-10T17:23:40Z")
I’m having fun with this one… I’m actually working on something similar for my site. This might be overly complicated, but… Assuming there is a table somewhere which links IDs to study/publisher info… Let’s say these BBCode style tags are used in “study\_reviews” and that there is a “study\_review.body” field in the DB that has [pubmed] tags in it… First customize BBCodeizer to regex [pubmed:.\*] in to \<%= link\_to @pubmed.author + ". " + @pubmed.date, “www.foo.bar/” + @pubmed.id %\> The goal here is to get BBCodeizer to export the ERB, not do the replacemets. In your study\_review controller have the application flow go something like this… Do a regex on the study\_review.body for [pubmed:(.\*)] If found, regex out the ID from the tag @pubmed=Pubmed.find(regex\_resutl) So when the bbcodeizer function is run during the view, it will convert to ERB, which could then be processed again by rails? Now that I am typing this out, I am doubting myself that the ERB will ever get executed after coming out of the bbcodizer. But give it a try… On Apr 10, 10:33 am, Stefan F. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@spiderware](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/spiderware)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2008, 8:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/extending-bluecloth-redcloth/134404/6 "2008-04-11T08:09:27Z")
> see: > [http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-custom-textile](http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-custom-textile) Thx! Exactly, what I was looking for!!