How To Fix Textile Paragraphs in Rails

Rails has a built in textilize() method but it by default treats a new line as a BR tag. Which is really lame and annoying.

The code the Rails textilize() method uses is:
textilized = RedCloth.new(text, [ :hard_breaks ])

What this does is causes some textile text like this

h1. Birds

I know all about birds. They have wings.

Birds eat worms.

into this HTML

<h1>Birds</h1>
<br/>
I know all about birds. They have wings.
<br/>
Birds eat worms.

Not good code at all!

The Solution

Rails by default isn’t behaving how we need it so we have to override the method Rails uses. We do this by creating our own textilize() method in our application helper that doesn’t include the [:hard_breaks] option Rails does.

module ApplicationHelper

  def textilize(text) # overriding Rails method to remove hardbreaks
    if text.blank?
     "" 
    else
     textilized = RedCloth.new(text).to_html
    end
  end

end

So there you have it. Call the Textilize method now and you’re Textile will be nicely formatted with paragraphs.