CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3.1formattingtextareanewline
Pedro Cori
Pedro Cori

Reputation: 2066

Rails 3: Why does an indent appear when repopulating text_areas with line breaks?

I'm trying to program some forms that include text_area tags in Rails 3.1.3. Generally these text areas are filled with more than one paragraph (i.e. they include line breaks). If I save the text and display it with simple_format, the paragraphs display correctly, but if I repopulate the same form for editing, the format seems to add an indent after every line break. So, for example, if I input the following into the text area of the form:

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

And I save it, the next time I load the form to edit the data, the text_area is populated with the following:

Item 1
    Item 2
    Item 3

Does anyone know why this happens and how to fix it? The segment of the form view that displays this follows:

    <fieldset>
        <section class="field">
            <%= f.label "Títulos, seminarios, cursos" %>
            <%= f.text_area :titles_seminars_courses %>
        </section>
        ...
    </fieldset>

I'm not doing anything special when saving to the database (no gsub or anything), just directly saving the 'Item 1\r\nItem 2\r\nItem 3\r\n' string. I'm using the same form for the initial creation and edition of this data.

Thank you in advance for any help with this issue.

EDIT 1:

The view that displays the data correctly is the following (but it's not in a text_area):

<section class="titles_seminars_courses">
    <%= simple_format(@academic_background.titles_seminars_courses, :class => "other_study") %>
</section>

EDIT 2:

<textarea cols="40" id="academic_background_titles_seminars_courses" name="academic_background[titles_seminars_courses]" rows="20">Item 1
        Item 2
        Item 3</textarea>

Upvotes: 1

Views: 650

Answers (2)

TinMonkey
TinMonkey

Reputation: 1842

For HAML, If you use:

 ~ f.text_area

instead of:

= f.text_area

it has the same effect as Haml::Template.options[:ugly] = true and will preserve the whitespace in your saved text string, rather than trying to pretty it up.

read more in the docs here

Upvotes: 0

Pedro Cori
Pedro Cori

Reputation: 2066

Ok, the problem seemed to be the mix between html.haml and html.erb views in the application. So either the .erb views are not properly rendered, or they don't play nice with the other .haml views. In mi case, for example, the application layout view is in haml, but the form was in erb.

Whatever the cause, the bottom line is that the text_area_tags don't render correctly in erb, but do in haml. So my workaround, although I know it is very hacky and not pretty, was to make a small partial in haml called _text_area.html.haml which renders just the textarea for a form:

_text_area.html.haml:

-if defined? options
    = f.text_area field, options
-else
    = f.text_area field

So every time I want to have a text_area tag in a form, I have to call a render like so:

<%= form_for @instance do |f| %>
    ...
    <%= render :partial => 'common/text_area', :locals => {:f => f, :field => :some_field_from_instance, :options => {:cols => 40, :rows => 10}} %>
    <%= render :partial => 'common/text_area', :locals => {:f => f, :field => :some_other_field} %>
    ...
<% end %>

This renders perfectly. That's why I think the problem lies with haml and its interpretation of indentation. If anyone has a better solution, please do let me know.

Upvotes: 2

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