Autolinking urls in string (replacing urls with link tags)

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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I’m having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around how to implement an autolinking feature in my Phoenix application. Something like rails_autolink from rails (https://github.com/tenderlove/rails_autolink)

The idea is that I want to scan some user-content and replace all urls with link-tags.

Now, I could technically just make a regular expression and just use it with String.replace to replace the urls, but since I will be using this in combination with text_to_html to also split the text into paragraphs it becomes a little more complex, since text_to_html returns a {:safe, string} tuple. Furthermore when I start replacing the urls by using the Phoenix.HTML.Link.link it becomes a bit of a mess, since I end up with something like:

["<p>This is a test:\r<br>\n", {:safe, [60, "a", [[32, "class", 61, 34, "embed", 34], [32, "href", 61, 34, "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmAI_MwdASw", 34]], 62, "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmAI_MwdASw", 60, 47, "a", 62]} | "</p>\n"]

Which Phoenix seems to choke on:

ArgumentError at GET /forums/4/forum_topics/16
argument error
nofile
No code available.
:erlang.iolist_to_binary/1
Called with 1 arguments
["<p>This is a test:\r<br>\n", {:safe, [60, "a", [[32, "class", 61, 34, "embed", 34], [32, "href", 61, 34, "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmAI_MwdASw", 34]], 62, "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmAI_MwdASw", 60, 47, "a", 62]} | "</p>\n"]

I think I’m missing something here. What would be the “correct” way to accomplish this?

1 Like
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I’m working on this as well, if I figure it out and remember to come back, I’ll add my solution here. Or if you figured it out, do update please.

1 Like
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Have you tried using Phoenix.HTML.safe_to_string/1 on the result of text_to_html?

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