Question

I am using bb-code in a Rails application for postings and comments. At the moment, I have the following to put a post’s content in a view:

<%= @post.content.bbcode_to_html.html_safe.gsub('<a', '<a rel="nofollow"') %>

What is the best way to convert the bb-code to html and add “nofollow” to all links?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The bb-ruby gem you are using allows for using custom BBCode translations passed as parameters to the bbcode_to_html method. However, if you really want ALL links to contain the rel="nofollow", I think your best bet is going to be monkey patching them gem itself. Based on the BBRuby source, you want to do this:

module BBRuby
  @@tags = @@tags.merge({
    'Link' => [
      /\[url=(.*?)\](.*?)\[\/url\]/mi,
      '<a href="\1" rel="nofollow">\2</a>',
      'Hyperlink to somewhere else',
      'Maybe try looking on [url=http://google.com]Google[/url]?',
      :link],
    'Link (Implied)' => [
      /\[url\](.*?)\[\/url\]/mi,
      '<a href="\1" rel="nofollow">\1</a>',
      'Hyperlink (implied)',
      "Maybe try looking on [url]http://google.com[/url]",
      :link],
    'Link (Automatic)' => [
      /(\A|\s)((https?:\/\/|www\.)[^\s<]+)/,
      ' <a href="\2" rel="nofollow">\2</a>',
      'Hyperlink (automatic)',
      'Maybe try looking on http://www.google.com',
      :link]
    })
end

This will rewrite the BBRuby translator to always include a nofollow attribute. I would put this in config/initializers with a descriptive filename such as bbruby_nofollow_monkeypatch.rb

As for the html_safe, I would leave that as is. As I understand it that is a preferred way of doing it and in my opinion it keeps your intent clear. The above monkey patch makes the line in your view more readable:

<%= @post.content.bbcode_to_html.html_safe %>