Replacing a substring with a link on the fly - ruby-on-rails

Question

In my app, I store emails.
I want to parse those emails for email addresses in the text, on the fly and replace them with a link (so that we send the email through the app).
e.g.
#email.body = "Hi Tom, Drop me a line at jerry#cheese.com."
I want some sort of helper that will translate that on the fly to:
#email.sanitized_body
"Hi Tom, Drop me a line at #{link_to "Email", email_send_email_path("jerry#cheese.com")}."
I've been around a few circles.
e.g. in a model
Class Email
def sanitized_body
text = self.body
emails = text.scan(/\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+#[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b/i)
emails.each do |email|
text.gsub!("jerry#cheese.com", helper.link_to("email", "http://www.google.com"))
end
text
end
I'm sure there's a sensible way of doing this, probably with a helper but can't quite work it out...
module EmailsHelper
def sanitized_body(email_body)
text = email_body
emails = text.scan(/\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+#[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b/i)
emails.each do |email|
text.gsub!("jerry#cheese.com", "#{link_to("email", "http://www.google.com")}")
end
text
end
end
Gets me almost there. But the text comes out as text in the string when displayed.
Any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

You should use html_safe for your text to be rendered as HTML code instead of a simple string.
module EmailsHelper
def sanitized_body(email_body)
text = email_body
emails = text.scan(/\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+#[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b/i)
replace_text = "You text %s" % helper.link_to("email", "http://www.google.com")
emails.each do |email|
text.gsub!("jerry#cheese.com", replace_text.html_safe)
end
text
end
end