Text::Format assistance needed

Rails
1

Hello everyone,

I was reading through the Rails API and came across Text::Format. It
appears as if I can use this to format my text for my users. I’ll be
launching a creative writing website and if I can allow members text
formatting to remain the same as it would be in a word processor, that
would really be beneficial. I’m not looking for a WYSIWYG editor - I
just want the tabs to be preserved from a cut and paste.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any type of help on this class. I’m
fairly new with Ruby on Rails, though can follow tutorials like no
other. If you know of a tutorial that utilizes this class, that would
be most helpful. Otherwise, some usage examples would be very much
appreciated.

Thanks for your time and help!

~Dustin T.

2

Nudge Not to be obnoxious, though any help would be appreciated. A
mere point in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks!

~Dustin T.

3

Dustin T. wrote:

if I can allow members text
formatting to remain the same as it would be in a word processor, that
would really be beneficial. I’m not looking for a WYSIWYG editor - I
just want the tabs to be preserved from a cut and paste.

You might want to look into RedCloth and BlueCloth. They are Ruby
libraries that provide support for Textile and Markdown, markup
notations that are simpler than HTML. If you’re familiar with editing
Wikipedia pages, it’s kind of like that.

Preserving tabs might be a bit tricky though. I don’t know how you’d
render them in HTML – maybe a series of   ?

4

Thanks Jeremy,

I have looked into RedCloth and BlueCloth before. Unfortunately, these
gems / plugins add ‘too’ much functionality. The Text::Format class
looks like to does exactly what I want it to do, I just don’t know how
to use it. Here is a link to the Rails API:
http://www.railsbrain.com/api/rails-2.1.0/doc/index.html?a=C00000543&name=Text::Format

As for tabs, I’m assuming the object adds  s, just as you said.

Anyway, thanks for the reply! Any further help would be much
appreciated. Thanks!

~Dustin T.

On Jul 24, 6:11 pm, Jeremy Weiskotten <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-

5

I believe I’ve found a solution to my problem. A PHP programmer
thought it was odd that RoR didn’t have a \n to
converter, such
as the nl2br method. Thus, he wrote a helper method:

def nl2br(s)
s.gsub(/\n/, ‘
’ + “\n”)
end

I took this code and changed it out with a \t and created:

def tabber(s)
s.gsub(/\t/, ’    ')
end

This, in combination with simple_format, does everything I want. An
example of the usage:

<%= tabber simple_format “Here is my text” %>

Hope that helps someone. Thanks for your help!

~Dustin T.