Rails: array.join with html in delimiter escaped

Question

I have an array of strings containing unsaved content (user input).

I want to join these lines in my template, separated by <br /> .

I tried:

 somearray.join("<br />") 

But it will also save the spararator.

Is there a workaround, bearing in mind that the contents of the array must absolutely be escaped?

Answer 1

Is there a reason why it should be a <br /> tag? Could you use a list?

 <ul> <% somearray.each do |item| %> <%= content_tag :li, item %> <% end %> </ul> 

Answer 2

Have you tried this?

 raw somearray.join("<br />") 

Answer 3

raw and h provide ways to selectively apply this default behavior.

 <%= raw user_values_array.map {|user_value| h user_value }.join('<br />') %> 

Even better, Rails 3.1 introduced safe_join(array, sep) for this purpose. Used with html_safe , it can do what you need.

 <%= safe_join(user_values_array, "<br />".html_safe) %> 

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