Flowdock
method

auto_link

Importance_4
v3.0.9 - Show latest stable - 2 notes - Class: ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
auto_link(text, *args, &block) public

Turns all URLs and e-mail addresses into clickable links. The :link option will limit what should be linked. You can add HTML attributes to the links using :html. Possible values for :link are :all (default), :email_addresses, and :urls. If a block is given, each URL and e-mail address is yielded and the result is used as the link text.

Examples

auto_link("Go to http://www.rubyonrails.org and say hello to david@loudthinking.com")
# => "Go to <a href=\"http://www.rubyonrails.org\">http://www.rubyonrails.org</a> and
#     say hello to <a href=\"mailto:david@loudthinking.com\">david@loudthinking.com</a>"

auto_link("Visit http://www.loudthinking.com/ or e-mail david@loudthinking.com", :link => :urls)
# => "Visit <a href=\"http://www.loudthinking.com/\">http://www.loudthinking.com/</a>
#     or e-mail david@loudthinking.com"

auto_link("Visit http://www.loudthinking.com/ or e-mail david@loudthinking.com", :link => :email_addresses)
# => "Visit http://www.loudthinking.com/ or e-mail <a href=\"mailto:david@loudthinking.com\">david@loudthinking.com</a>"

post_body = "Welcome to my new blog at http://www.myblog.com/.  Please e-mail me at me@email.com."
auto_link(post_body, :html => { :target => '_blank' }) do |text|
  truncate(text, 15)
end
# => "Welcome to my new blog at <a href=\"http://www.myblog.com/\" target=\"_blank\">http://www.m...</a>.
      Please e-mail me at <a href=\"mailto:me@email.com\">me@email.com</a>."

You can still use auto_link with the old API that accepts the link as its optional second parameter and the html_options hash as its optional third parameter:

post_body = "Welcome to my new blog at http://www.myblog.com/. Please e-mail me at me@email.com."
auto_link(post_body, :urls)     # => Once upon\na time
# => "Welcome to my new blog at <a href=\"http://www.myblog.com/\">http://www.myblog.com</a>.
      Please e-mail me at me@email.com."

auto_link(post_body, :all, :target => "_blank")     # => Once upon\na time
# => "Welcome to my new blog at <a href=\"http://www.myblog.com/\" target=\"_blank\">http://www.myblog.com</a>.
      Please e-mail me at <a href=\"mailto:me@email.com\">me@email.com</a>."
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August 6, 2009
4 thanks

Documentation bug

When adding the :target option, the documentation states that you should user :href_options like so:

auto_link(post_body, :href_options => { :target => '_blank' })

However, I could only get it to work using :html instead:

auto_link(post_body, :html => { :target => '_blank' })

I’m using Rails 2.2.2, but I believe that this also happens for more recent version .

November 6, 2011 - (>= v3.1.0)
3 thanks

Removed in 3.1.x

This method (and #auto_link_urls) has been removed in Rails 3.1 - other options are out there, such as Rinku, however there is a gem you can use for migration purposes etc, which is rails_autolink: http://rubygems.org/gems/rails_autolink