Breaking long words from user input in Rails views

Suppose a user fills his profile "About" section and has a very long "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa......" word in it which breaks the site markup. Now, this word needs to be broken.

Generally, there are two ways to do it. I can either write a Rails helper which will do the job, and it will result in something like (HAML here)

.about= break_long_words(@user.about)

in my views, or I can use css and say:

.about { word-break: break-all; }

However the problem is that both options require me to go through soooo many places in my views (where I output something users entered into a field once) and I need to insert either an appropriate class name or a call to the break_long_words helper! I can't remember all of those places.

Unfortunately, I also can't use body { word-break: break-all } because it behaves really odd, breaking rather short words in odd places.

Ideally, I'd like to just list all fields in a model that require word breaking when called from views. How would one go about this task?

Solution

You may consider using a decorator with the Draper gem.

As a very rough example:

# Note, name as #{ClassName}Decorator

class UserInputDecorator < Draper::Decorator
  delegate_all

  LONG_ATTRS = %i(
    attr1
    attr2
  ).freeze

  LONG_ATTRS.each do |long_attr|
    define_method long_attr do
      # your code to break word here
    end
  end
end

You can then call decorate on the instance and it should override the values rendered in the view.