troubleshooting icons in link_to

Question

Alright guys, this one seems like a slowball, but I'm stumped here. I'm currently using rails 4.1.1 and trying to get a link_to to appear as a button with an icon instead of text.

erb:

<%= link_to messages_path, do %>
  <i class="btn btn-primary glyphicon glyphicon-envelope"></i>
<% end %> 

Basically I grabbed the above code from here, but it gives me this error when I try to use it:

/Users/user/project/app/views/pages/home.html.erb:20: syntax error, unexpected keyword_do_block ...end= link_to messages_path, do @output_buffer.safe_append=' ... ^ /Users/user/project/app/views/pages/home.html.erb:29: syntax error, unexpected keyword_ensure, expecting end-of-input

Answer 1

depending on which bootstrap version you have try one of these:

<%= link_to messages_path, class: 'btn btn-primary' do %>
  <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-envelope"></span>
<% end %>

or

<%= link_to messages_path, class: 'btn btn-primary' do %>
  <i class="glyphicon glyphicon-envelope"></i>
<% end %>

Basically the btn class belongs on your link and the glyphicon is probably a span now.