Question

I have something like this:

<p>
  <b>Tags:</b>
  <%if @post.tags.count > 0%>
    <%= @post.tags.collect {|c| (link_to c.name, c)}.join(", ")%>
  <%else%>
    Does not have any tags.
  <%end%>
</p>

Which gives me

Tags: <a href="/tags/1">Java</a>, <a href="/tags/2">CSS</a>

Instead of Java and CSS links. What am I missing?

Answer 1

It’s because strings in Rails 3 are, by default, not considered HTML-safe. See this blog post about it.

You can manually mark something as safe by calling .html_safe on it, which would make your code like so:

<p>
  <b>Tags:</b>
  <%if @post.tags.count > 0%>
    <%= @post.tags.collect {|c| (link_to c.name, c)}.join(", ").html_safe %>
  <%else%>
    Does not have any tags.
  <%end%>
</p>

But I’d recommend doing this instead:

<p>
  <b>Tags:</b>
  <% if @post.tags.count > 0%>
    <% @post.tags.each_with_index do |tag, i| %>
      <%= link_to h(tag.name), tag %><%= ', ' if i < @post.tags.size - 1 %>
    <% end %>
  <% else %>
    Does not have any tags.
  <%end%>
</p>