File: README.rdoc

StripAttributes

StripAttributes is a Rails plugin that automatically strips all ActiveRecord model attributes of leading and trailing whitespace before validation. If the attribute is blank, it strips the value to nil.

It works by adding a before_validation hook to the record. By default, all attributes are stripped of whitespace, but :only and :except options can be used to limit which attributes are stripped. Both options accept a single attribute (:only => :field) or arrays of attributes (:except => [:field1, :field2, :field3]).

Examples

  class DrunkPokerPlayer < ActiveRecord::Base
    strip_attributes!
  end

  class SoberPokerPlayer < ActiveRecord::Base
    strip_attributes! :except => :boxers
  end

  class ConservativePokerPlayer < ActiveRecord::Base
    strip_attributes! :only => [:shoe, :sock, :glove]
  end

Installation

Option 1. Use the standard Rails plugin install (assuming Rails 2.1).

  ./script/plugin install git://github.com/rmm5t/strip_attributes.git

Option 2. Use git submodules

  git submodule add git://github.com/rmm5t/strip_attributes.git vendor/plugins/strip_attributes

Option 3. Use braid (assuming you‘re using git)

  braid add --rails_plugin git://github.com/rmm5t/strip_attributes.git
  git merge braid/track

Other

If you want to use this outside of Rails, extend StripAttributes in your ActiveRecord model after putting strip_attributes in your $LOAD_PATH:

  require 'strip_attributes'
  class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base
    extend StripAttributes
    strip_attributes!
  end

Support

The StripAttributes homepage is stripattributes.rubyforge.org. You can find the StripAttributes RubyForge progject page at: rubyforge.org/projects/stripattributes

StripAttributes source is hosted on GitHub: github.com/rmm5t/strip_attributes

Feel free to submit suggestions or feature requests. If you send a patch, remember to update the corresponding unit tests. In fact, I prefer new features to be submitted in the form of new unit tests.

Credits

The idea was triggered by the information at wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToStripWhitespaceFromModelFields but was modified from the original to include more idiomatic ruby and rails support.