Fixing ugly view syntax

I was busy working on some view templates, but there was some syntax in my views that was absolutely annoying me.

<%= submit_tag h(_('Update')) %>

This can be solved in three locations, all of them extremely ugly:

• Overwrite submit_tag in the form builder to escape every parameter. This will cause all different uses of submit_tag to break.
• Escape all entries in my gettext po file and drop the h. Which is not very secure.
• Overwrite _ to escape everything, which will cause all sorts of strange behaviour on other locations.

After looking at all four, I realised I could fix it a fourth way:

module ApplicationHelper
 def h_(string)
    h(_(string))
 end
end

Making my forms now much nicer to look at and very secure:

<%= submit_tag h_('Update') %>

Dr. Nic, eat your heart out :)!

Ps: add this to your gettext rake task:

 GetText::RubyParser::ID = GetText::RubyParser::ID + ['h_']