Wondering if there is a Rails recipe out there to help me handle a
large amount of text entry.
Basically, the user can enter text with variable spacing (extra spaces,
newlines). I don’t want to allow HTML or other formatting at this
time. Just basic text entry. Of course, special characters need to
translate properly.
I created the column to store this value in mySQL using migration’s
“text” field type.
I save what is entered. It looks pretty normal when browsing the
database. However, when displaying the value back out to the screen,
all spacing is lost, naturally. I imagine I’ll have to do some
encoding of space and newline characters before putting the text entry
field value to the database. But I figured I’d check with the
community because it’d seem there’d be a better way, perhaps with a
helper I’m unaware of.
I save what is entered. It looks pretty normal when browsing the
database. However, when displaying the value back out to the screen,
all spacing is lost, naturally. I imagine I’ll have to do some
encoding of space and newline characters before putting the text entry
field value to the database. But I figured I’d check with the
community because it’d seem there’d be a better way, perhaps with a
helper I’m unaware of.
You could use the ‘textilize’ function to format it.
However, when displaying the value back out to the screen,
all spacing is lost, naturally. I imagine I’ll have to do some
encoding of space and newline characters before putting the text entry
field value to the database
The simple_format() helper is good for simple cases like this. It
merely converts new lines to break tags and paragraphs as
appropriate. You can store your text in the database as normal,
formatting it only as required for display: