Question

I’ve ran into various problems with various sites over the years with users putting spaces at the start/end of string and text fields. Sometimes these cause formatting/layout problems, sometimes they cause searching problems (ie search order looking wrong even though it isn’t really), sometimes they actually crash the app.

I thought it would be useful, rather than putting in a bunch of before_save callbacks as i have done in the past, to add some functionality to ActiveRecord to automatically call .strip on any string/text fields before saving, unless i tell it not to, eg with do_not_strip :field_x, :field_y or something similar at the top of the class definition.

Before i go and figure out how to do this, has anyone seen a nicer solution? Just to be clear, i already know that i can do this:

before_save :strip_text_fields

def strip_text_fields
  self.field_x.strip!
  self.field_y.strip!
end

but i’m looking for a nicer way.

cheers, max

Answer 1

I’ve written a plugin for this purpose some time ago. I haven’t tried it in a while and it doesn’t have tests – so no guaranties that it still works. The upside would be a clean model:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  strip_strings :title, :abstract, :text
end