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Interpret newline escape codes in dialog messages?

See original GitHub issue

See rails/rails#16784

Currently, to get a newline in a data-confirm dialog, you need to either:

Let it be interpreted as a newline at the Ruby string level (when using Rails helpers) or
Insert an explicit newline in your HTML (when writing standard HTML) or
Use an HTML escape code like 
 or , and make sure the string is marked as html_safe on the Rails end so those codes aren’t escaped.

The issue with 1 is that any Ruby string newlines are reflected in the HTML source, so the output of both methods 1 and 2 might look like:

<body>
  <div id="main-container">
    <div class="links">
      <ul>
        <li><a href="path/to/whatever" data-confirm="I want a gap between this line...

...and this line">My link</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">Another link</a></li>
      </ul>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>

You can imagine if you had a lot of these how messy it might look, though it is apparently valid.

3 is simply a bit of an obscure/hacky workaround.

Id prefer to be able to specify something like:

<a href="path/to/whatever" data-confirm="I want a gap between this line...\n\n...and this line">My link</a>

and have jquery-ujs interpret those newlines just as calling

confirm("I want a gap between this line...\n\n...and this line");

in Javascript would. Currently it just gives literal "\n"s in the message instead.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 9 years ago
Comments:7 (3 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

Ruxtoncommented, Jul 22, 2016

As per https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/16784#issuecomment-234437275

<%= link_to 'Click me', '#', data: { confirm: 'Line\nNewLine' } %>

$.rails.confirm = function(message) {
 return confirm(message.replace(/(\\n|\\r|\\r\\n)/gm,"\n"))
}

1reaction

noinklingcommented, Sep 9, 2014

Doing a .replace(/\\n/g, "\n") on what gets returned from .data('confirm') seems to work. The only issue I can think of if this was implemented, is that if you wanted a literal “\n” in your message, you’d need to double-escape it (single quotes) or triple-escape it (double quotes) in Ruby. Same for any other escape codes if you chose to support them.