Question

I currently have the following code (jQuery) in my view, and when title has a \n character then it breaks my js.

$("#t").html("#{title.html_safe}");

The following works but I think it’s somewhat a hack:

$("#t").html("#{title.gsub("\n","")}");

Answer 1

The method you are looking for is String#chomp. It will remove any carriage return characters from the end of your string.

$("#t").html("#{title.chomp}");

As always, only use html_safe if you are completely sure the title variable is safe… especially since you are using it within a Javascript file! I did not include it in my code example because I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Plus, see the note on APIdock in regards to using html_safe on a variable that could be nil. I would suggest only using it on a string literal.

EDIT:

If there is a chance that your title may contain quotes that need to be escaped before used in Javascript (for instance '"Winter is Coming", I say' which will interpolate into your javascript as .html(""Winter is Coming", I say");) then you should also use the escape_javascript method as suggested in the link @mu is too short provided.

$("#t").html("#{j(title.chomp)}");

If title = '"Winter is Coming"' then the above code would produce.

$("#t").html("\"Winter is Coming\"");

If there is also a chance that there is a carriage return in the middle of the title string, then String#gsub is the way to go.

$("#t").html("#{j(title.gsub(/[\n\r]/, " "))}");

I put a space in the second parameter of gsub so 'Winter\nis\nComing' would become 'Winter is Coming' and not 'WinterisComing'.