Gem You Should Know About: auto_html

3.13.2017

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One of the things I like about Ruby is the tremendous ecosystem that surrounds it. I'm always excited when I find a new gem to incorporate into my apps. A neat one I found recently is auto_html.

Basically, this gem will recognize when there's some html in your text record and apply it. But what I thought was especially cool is that you can enable it look for other things, such as links, markdown, images, and even emoji.

The links part is neat because you don't need to wrap the text in a tags for it to recognize it as a link.

The docs do a good job of describing the set up; it's pretty easy. Instantiate a new Auto_Html instance like so:

markdown = AutoHtml::Markdown.new

Then pass what you want to have the effect into that variable's call method:

@output = markdown.call('### some markdown')

If you want to have multiple wrappers, you can create a pipeline like so:

FORMAT = AutoHtml::Pipeline.new( AutoHtml::Markdown.new, AutoHtml::Link.new )

I did this in my Application Helper, but there are perhaps better locations for it (maybe someone else can tell me). Then I called:

@object_output = FORMAT.call(object.text)

As an added note, I did still have to add 'raw' to the front of my instance variables in the view, i.e. <%= raw @variable %>.

Let me know about some other gems or ways to do this. Or other cool gems in general!