Home/ Questions/Q 8019189
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-04T21:18:38+00:00

My goal is to find something like ‘b1234’ in a paragraph and replace it

  • 0

My goal is to find something like ‘b1234’ in a paragraph and replace it with: 

<a href=http://bugtracker.com/bug/1234>b1234</a>

I made this using plain ruby:

"I fixed b1234 today".gsub(/(b([0-9]+))/i, '<a href=http://bugtracker.com/bug/\2>\1</a>')

It outputs:

=> "I fixed <a href=http://bugtracker.com/bug/1234>b1234</a> today"

I have the following in my rails view:

<%= post.content %>

Note: I don’t store the HTML link code in my DB when posts are created.

If I do:

<%= post.content.gsub(...) %>

I get escaped html in the output file:

&lt;a href= ... instead of <a href= ...

…And I want that behavior, I don’t want users posting HTML (iframes would be scary!).

But, how I can I still get the find and replace functionality I want without sacrificing security? Maybe a Javascript approach?

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Double up the equals signs. <%== post.content.gsub(...) %>. If users are also potentially writing HTML in this content, then you’ll need to Sanitize it, so that only specified HTML tags are permitted, for example.

    EDIT | Actually, provided the search string you are replacing does not contain HTML special characters, you can just escape the string, then do the gsub:

    <%== h(post.content).gsub(...) %>
    • 0