Render multiline text with Rails?

Question

I'd like to render multiline text in Rails, the action looks like:

def mutli_text
  render :text => 'Word1\nWord2'
end

and I'd expect the response to be :

Word1
Word2

unfortunatly I get Word1\nWord2

Any help would be appreciated

(The action must render a multiline response to get the autocomplete jquery plugin working)

Answer 1

"Word1\nWord2"

You have to use double quotes to be able to use escaped characters.

But if you want to have that actually be a line break in the browser, you need to make it an actual html tag.

'Word1<br/>Word2'

Or even:

"Word1<br/>\nWord2"

Answer 2

you can actually do something like this:

(render :text => "line1\nline2").gsub("\n",'<br />')

It at least works on #render within a view (using HAML). I haven't tried it within a controller action.

Answer 3

Just render the text as plain. You can even change the content type to csv if you want to.

render :plain => 'Word1\nWord2', :content_type => "text/csv"