Malformed HTML be gone! When you allow users to enter raw HTML into a wide open textarea, you're asking for trouble. Missing closing tags and tags closed in the wrong order can really make your layouts go bananas. This little library is an attempt to repair those issues. Just leave it to the Markup Mechanic (thanks to Chris Scharf for the name).

Just add gem "markup_mechanic" to your Gemfile.

Note: this gem is designed to use with Rails projects using ActiveRecord.

It's rather simple to use. Once installed, just add one line to your model, passing it the columns that you wish to repair.

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  repair_markup_for :caption, :body
end

Each time the record is saved, those columns will run through a parser (or, "mechanic") that will repair the invalid HTML.

Let's say a user enters the following HTML into a textarea and saves it.

<div><p>This is my <strong>HTML</div>

If the Markup Mechanic is involved, here's what will get saved:

<div><p>This is my <strong>HTML</strong></p></div>

You never can be too safe when humans are involved!

Under the hood, we're really just relying on the amazing Nokogiri library to do the dirty work. That's the default. But if you wanted to customize the behavior of the mechanic, you can add your own custom adapter.

Two requirements:

1. Your class must be initialized to accept an HTML string
2. Your class must implement a fix! instance method

For example, in your Rails project, let's say in config/initializers/markup_mechanic.rb you might do something like this:

class MyAwesomeMechanic
  attr_reader :html

  def initialize(html)
    @html = html
  end

  def fix!
    # do your fancy work here
  end
end

MarkupMechanic.configure do |config|
  config.adapter = MyAwesomeMechanic
end

That's really it. Now the repair_markup_for method will run those columns through your custom parser instead.

Chris Scharf for the name and inspiration to package this up as a gem.

Copyright (c) Ryan Heath

Published under the MIT License, see LICENSE