Proper way to manage i18n strings that could have HTML in them

[davetron5000]

As I translate my app to use Phlex, one of the things I'm not sure how to solve for is the way I'm doing i18n. I'm using the Ruby i18n library, but this is in a Sinatra app, not rails. I'm porting a custom ERB-based view layer to Phlex.

In my custom implementation, my version of t returns a class called HTMLSafeString, which my custom view layer uses to know if a string is safe to render directly without escaping. This class is unnecessary in a Phlex world, but this leads to my question.

I have a few i18n strings like so:

contact_support: "Delete some widgets or <a href='mailto:support@example.com'>contact support</a> for a limit increase",

If I can avoid HTML in i18n strings entirely, that would be great, but I'm not sure how to do that here, since you generally want to avoid dynamically building sentences since each language constructs them differently.

In my custom view layer, all i18n strings are wrapped in my HTMLSafeString class, because they are all server-side and controlled by me, so guaranteed to be safe (programmer errors notwithstanding :).

As I'm porting this to Phlex, I'm doing this:

p do
  raw(safe(t(:contact_support).to_s))
end

This works, but is error-prone and verbose. Even if Phlex were to start using to_str, I'd still need to raw(safe(...)) everywhere.

What is the right way to do this?

• I realize I can rewrite my t method to do the raw(safe(...)) bit - that might be OK
• Is there a phlex class I can wrap a string in that accomplishes the same thing?
• Something else?

[joeldrapper]

I believe Phlex will render the to_s of anything that extends Phlex::SGML::SafeObject implicitly. So you can omit the raw call in your example as long as it's the only thing in the block.

p do
  t(:contact_support)
end

If there’s something else in the block, you would have to use raw.

p do
  plain "Please contact "
  raw t(:contact_support)
end

A few options for the other bit:

1. you could rewrite your t method to return the output of safe;
2. you could include Phlex::SGML::SafeObject into your HTMLSafeString class; or
3. you could use Phlex::SGML::SafeValue instead of your HTMLSafeString, which is essentially the same thing. You can see the implementation here and all safe is doing is returning one of these. https://github.com/phlex-ruby/phlex/blob/main/lib/phlex/sgml/safe_value.rb

Another option is to make your t method return a renderable object.

Phlex’ render method will render various kinds of things like components, component classes and enumerable of components and component classes, but it also renders procs.

You could define t like this

def t(key)
  proc { raw(safe(I18n.whatever(key))) }
end

And then render translations like this

render t(:contact_support)

[davetron5000]

ok, these are all reasonable options - I will try them and see what works. Thanks!