Question

HI I am working on a rails application. I want to implement user tagging as facebook or twitter does. When user is posting in feed he can tag any user with @ character at starting.

I am using Jquery UI Autocomplete plugin.

I have this reference
Implementing jquery UI autocomplete to show suggestions when you type "@" which helped me to implement auto complete part.

But now I want to link that auto completed username to users profile url e.g Username = Mak then link should be generated like

<a href="http://www.example.com/username">Username</a>

So please guide me how can I implement this in my rails application?Is there any gem to do so.

Answer 1

Hey it doesn’t required above methods. I did it using simple regex.

<% @str = @madyrocks solved problem of @username tagging %>

<%=@result_string = @str.gsub(/(\^|\s|\B)@(([a-zA-Z])(_?[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*|_([a-zA-Z0-9]+_?)*)/i, 
%Q{ <a href="http://example.com/\\2">\@\\2</a>}) %>

In my regex I have used (\^|\s|\B) because @ can occur at start of string or after a white space while tagging a user.

([a-zA-Z])(_?[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*|_([a-zA-Z0-9]+_?)* This is used to validate username. In my application username must start with alphabet followed by alphabets & numbers.

The no. 2 used to take second match in regex.

For more details try the regex on Rubular.com

I hope this will help others.