Ruby on Rails: simple_format()
Last week, when working out how to render the line breaks from certain input into HTML emails, I stumbled upon the simple_format method in the ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper class. Per its own description, it “[r]eturns text transformed into HTML using simple formatting rules,” and it optionally sanitizes the input as well. Using it solved the problem for me.
One caveat: The text will be surrounded with an HTML tag pair, and there is no way to opt out. You can specify custom tags if you wish; otherwise, <p> will be used by default. Where I was inserting the method, I needed to avoid a block-level element, so I ended up using <span> tags, which felt like a decent way to skirt the issue.
Since a worker mentioned that he was unfamiliar with this method, I thought it might be worth mentioning here.