The SanitizeHelper module provides a set of methods for scrubbing text of undesired HTML elements. These helper methods extend ActionView making them callable within your template files.

Methods
Public Instance methods
sanitize(html, options = {})

This sanitize helper will html encode all tags and strip all attributes that aren‘t specifically allowed. It also strips href/src tags with invalid protocols, like javascript: especially. It does its best to counter any tricks that hackers may use, like throwing in unicode/ascii/hex values to get past the javascript: filters. Check out the extensive test suite.

  <%= sanitize @article.body %>

You can add or remove tags/attributes if you want to customize it a bit. See ActionView::Base for full docs on the available options. You can add tags/attributes for single uses of sanitize by passing either the :attributes or :tags options:

Normal Use

  <%= sanitize @article.body %>

Custom Use (only the mentioned tags and attributes are allowed, nothing else)

  <%= sanitize @article.body, :tags => %w(table tr td), :attributes => %w(id class style)

Add table tags to the default allowed tags

  Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
    config.action_view.sanitized_allowed_tags = 'table', 'tr', 'td'
  end

Remove tags to the default allowed tags

  Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
    config.after_initialize do
      ActionView::Base.sanitized_allowed_tags.delete 'div'
    end
  end

Change allowed default attributes

  Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
    config.action_view.sanitized_allowed_attributes = 'id', 'class', 'style'
  end

Please note that sanitizing user-provided text does not guarantee that the resulting markup is valid (conforming to a document type) or even well-formed. The output may still contain e.g. unescaped ’<’, ’>’, ’&’ characters and confuse browsers.

    # File actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/sanitize_helper.rb, line 51
51:       def sanitize(html, options = {})
52:         self.class.white_list_sanitizer.sanitize(html, options).try(:html_safe)
53:       end
sanitize_css(style)

Sanitizes a block of CSS code. Used by sanitize when it comes across a style attribute.

    # File actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/sanitize_helper.rb, line 56
56:       def sanitize_css(style)
57:         self.class.white_list_sanitizer.sanitize_css(style)
58:       end
strip_links(html)

Strips all link tags from text leaving just the link text.

Examples

  strip_links('<a href="http://www.rubyonrails.org">Ruby on Rails</a>')
  # => Ruby on Rails

  strip_links('Please e-mail me at <a href="mailto:me@email.com">me@email.com</a>.')
  # => Please e-mail me at me@email.com.

  strip_links('Blog: <a href="http://www.myblog.com/" class="nav" target=\"_blank\">Visit</a>.')
  # => Blog: Visit
    # File actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/sanitize_helper.rb, line 89
89:       def strip_links(html)
90:         self.class.link_sanitizer.sanitize(html)
91:       end
strip_tags(html)

Strips all HTML tags from the html, including comments. This uses the html-scanner tokenizer and so its HTML parsing ability is limited by that of html-scanner.

Examples

  strip_tags("Strip <i>these</i> tags!")
  # => Strip these tags!

  strip_tags("<b>Bold</b> no more!  <a href='more.html'>See more here</a>...")
  # => Bold no more!  See more here...

  strip_tags("<div id='top-bar'>Welcome to my website!</div>")
  # => Welcome to my website!
    # File actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/sanitize_helper.rb, line 74
74:       def strip_tags(html)
75:         self.class.full_sanitizer.sanitize(html).try(:html_safe)
76:       end