Question

I have a user defined external URL that I’d like to turn into a link by using something similar to Django’s urlize filter. How might one go about doing that?

I just need something to add in the preceding http:// or whatever if it’s lacking.

Unless I missed it, link_to doesn’t seem to do that.

Answer 1

I can see a couple of solutions:

• create a helper urlize(url) that adds http:// if it’s missing
• override the url getter on your model to add the http://
• add a before_save callback in your model to add the http:// to the url, thus making sure that you have a valid url in your db

Personally, I just have some validations that check that the url entered is valid. Here, I would use the 3rd option.