Question

I am working on a rails project. Using the tag observe_field, I am taking text typed into a text area, processing it in a control, and displaying the result in a div (very similar to the preview in stack overflow). Everything works fine until I type certain special chars.

1. ? => causes the variable not to be found in the params object
2. (pound) => causes an invalid authenticity error
3. % => stops the div from being updated
4. & => every thing after the & is no longer passed into the variable on the server.

Is there a way to solve this?

— code sample —

this is the view. ( ‘postbody’ is a text area)

<%= observe_field 'postbody',                      :update => 'preview',                      :url => {:controller => 'blog', :action => 'textile_to_html'},                     :frequency => 0.5,                     :with => 'postbody' -%> 

this is the controller that is called

def textile_to_html     text = params['postbody']     if text == nil then          @textile_to_html = '<br/>never set'     else          r = RedCloth.new text         @textile_to_html = r.to_html     end      render :layout => false  end  

and this is the javascript that is created:

new Form.Element.Observer('postbody', 0.5, function(element, value) {new Ajax.Updater('preview', '/blog/textile_to_html', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, parameters:'postbody=' + value + '&authenticity_token=' + encodeURIComponent('22f7ee12eac9efd418caa0fe76ae9e862025ef97')})}) 

Answer 1

This is an escaping issue (as stated by others).

You’ll want to change your observe_field :with statement to something like:

  :with => ''postbody=' + encodeURIComponent(value)' 

Then in your controller:

def textile_to_html   text = URI.unescape(params['postbody'])   ...