Question

I am using Rails 3. I am trying to do this in a helper:

def headers collection
  collection.each do |col|
     content_tag(:th, col.short_name)
  end
end

As you can see, the idea is that this does a content_tag to generate a <th> tag for each element in the collection. This doesn’t work because the HTML comes out as is made safe by Rails which makes it not work as HTML.

If I change it to this:

def headers collection
  collection.each do |col|
    concat (content_tag(:th, col.short_name))
  end
end

This works better. I get the correct markup in HTML, but before it I get all the markup HTML safe. So I think I am close.

I know there are other ways to do this but I wanted to try to do this in the right elegant way. What am I missing?

Answer 1

You could use inject and start with an html_safe empty string.

def headers collection
  collection.inject("".html_safe) do |content, col|
    content + (content_tag(:th, col.short_name))
  end
end