TextHelpers

TextHelpers is a library intended to make working with static text in Rails projects as painless as possible.

Include it in your Gemfile with:

gem "text_helpers"

Suggested Use

All static text should be placed in locale files, in a directory structure mirroring the app directory structure. The text for app/views/some/_partial.html.haml would go in config/locales/views/some/partial.en.yml, for example. This is not a strict requirement, but will go a long way toward keeping your locales easily maintainable.

If you're using this within a Rails project, you'll probably want to add the following line to your application.rb to ensure that Rails loads any locale files organized this way:

config.i18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('config', 'locales', '**', '*.{rb,yml}').to_s]

In any locale file entry, you can reference another key in the locale file by using the syntax !scope.to.key!. For the sake of maintainability, I recommend restricting the use of this feature to small, highly-recycled fragments of static text. I18n's built-in %{value} interpolation can be used for variable text.

In Views

To access this text in views, two helpers are available, text and html. Both helpers take a lookup key, used to identify the desired piece of text, and an argument hash, which is forwarded to the I18n.t call.

text returns the requested text, with special values interpolated, and made html_safe (so HTML can be used here, when absolutely necessary).

html parses the requested text using Markdown, making it useful for rendering larger pieces of text involving multiple paragraphs, list items or links.

html automatically parses Markdown using SmartyPants-style character conversions, so you can write plain text and have the proper typographical elements generated for you without having to explicitly insert HTML entities for common cases.

If you want to render a small fragment of Markdown without p tag wrappers, you can pass inline: true as an option to html.

text and html will escape all arguments passed to it in order to prevent XSS attacks. If you want to pass html content, you should ensure you mark it as .html_safe

Example: text('welcome_user', username) will escape html characters in username

Welcome <b>Bob</b>

Example: text('welcome_user', username.html_safe) will output html characters in username

Welcome <b>Bob</b>

In Controllers

The same helpers are available in controllers, with the translation scope based on the controller name rather than the view directory. This will typically be used for flash messages or alerts of some kind.

Testing

Some shared RSpec contexts are available to allow the same locale abstractions for testing. You can include these contexts with:

require "text_helpers/contexts"

Views

The view text helpers described above can be accessed in view specs by adding view: true to the spec metadata.

Controllers

The controller text helpers described above can be accessed in controller specs by adding controller: true to your spec metadata.

Temporary/Stub Localizations

text_helpers/rspec.rb contains some helpers for setting up a test localization environment during your test runs.

To configure it, require "text_helpers/rspec" and configure the before and after hooks appropriately:

require 'text_helpers/rspec'

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:suite) do
    TextHelpers::RSpec.setup_spec_translations
  end

  config.after(:each) do
    TextHelpers::RSpec.reset_spec_translations
  end
end

Temporary localizations can then be defined within your examples via the #set_translation method, like so:

set_translation('models.user.attributes.name', 'Name')

Configuration & Initialization

Initialization

TextHelpers performs some setup during your application's initialization. Four initializers are installed:

text_helpers.action_view.extend_base

This initializer includes the TextHelpers::Translation module into ActionView::Base and adds an appropriate #translation_scope method.

text_helpers.action_mailer.extend_base

This initializer includes the TextHelpers::Translation module into ActionMailer::Base and adds an appropriate #translation_scope method.

text_helpers.action_controller.extend_base

This initializer includes the TextHelpers::Translation module into ActionController::Base and adds an appropriate #translation_scope method.

text_helpers.setup_exception_handling

This initializer configures exception handling so that exceptions are raised if config.text_helpers.raise_on_missing_translations is set to true, which it is by default in the test or development environments.

Configuration

config.text_helpers.raise_on_missing_translations

This configuration value defaults to true in test or development environments. If set to false, your own exception handling can be configured by setting config.action_view.raise_on_missing_translations and I18n.exception_handler as appropriate.