Rails - Aug 2005 - HTML escape of umlauts

Cheers,

I work on a german site that obviously includes german words with umlauts in
its data.

It seems like the html_escape function (or simply h() function) will not
escape umlauts:

<%=h "ä" %> 

Will not produce &auml;

What is the best way to do this?


Thanks,
Jonathan

--
Jonathan Weiss
http://blog.innerewut.de

Jonathan Weiss wrote:
> I work on a german site that obviously includes german words with umlauts
in
> its data.
> It seems like the html_escape function (or simply h() function) will not
> escape umlauts:
> <%=h "ä" %> 
> Will not produce &auml;
> What is the best way to do this?
As far as I know, you actually don''t need to escape those -
it''s fine to just
put them in, as long as your character set supports them.  Use iso-8859-1 or 
utf-8, but not us-ascii, and you''ll be fine.

I built a site for an Austrian company and initially escaped them, but I 
noticed on one page where I''d forgotten to do it that it was completely
valid
iso-8859-1 XHTML 1.0 Strict markup and didn''t cause any problems, so I
left
them unencoded and undid my encoded ones too.

Validates perfectly, so as far as I know, no problems.

Maybe there''s a variation of the h function that escapes all
characters,
including standard alphanumeric characters, but that''s probably
overkill.

Cheers,

~Dave

-- 

Dave Silvester
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development
Web: http://www.rentamonkey.com/

On Tuesday 23 August 2005 23:35, Jonathan Weiss wrote:
> I work on a german site that obviously includes german words with
> umlauts in its data.
Just use them and make sure you''re using a suitable character encoding.
I''m happy with UTF-8.

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig                          Thinking is trying to make up
mailto:michael-q5aiKMLteq4b1SvskN2V4Q@public.gmane.org                for a gap
in one''s education.
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/                          --Gilbert Ryle