Question

I have a Rails 3 app that lets users enter comments. I want any valid URL in the comment to become a clickable link. Is there a safe way to do this?

Answer 1

You can use the auto_link method to do this.

auto_link("Go to http://www.rubyonrails.org and say hello to [e-mail]")
# => "Go to <a href=\"http://www.rubyonrails.org\">http://www.rubyonrails.org</a> and
#     say hello to <a href=\"mailto:[e-mail]\">[e-mail]</a>"

If you’re on anything less than Rails 3.1, this is built in, otherwise you would need to use the rails_autolink gem