Rails posts scaffold not parsing html - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to learn rails, and am using my blog as an excuse to do so.
Right now, I'm playing around with the posts scaffold. I get the MVC and the idea behind it, so I was about to recreate it, when I ran accross the following error.
If I enter content like
text
text
text
in the 'content' tag of posts form, It displays all the text as one block.
text text text
I thought I could try doing something like
<p>text</p>
<p>text</p>
<p>text</p>
but, it shows
<p>text</p><p>text</p><p>text</p>
What I'd like Rails to do is to actually parse the html in content. What would I do to get that to happen?
Here's the New Form Partial, which I used to submit the content
<%= form_for(#post) do |f| %>
<% if #post.errors.any? %>
<div id="error_explanation">
<h2><%= pluralize(#post.errors.count, "error") %> prohibited this post from being saved:</h2>
<ul>
<% #post.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
<li><%= msg %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
</div>
<% end %>
<div class="field">
<%= f.label :name %><br />
<%= f.text_field :name %>
</div>
<div class="field">
<%= f.label :title %><br />
<%= f.text_field :title %>
</div>
<div class="field">
<%= f.label :content %><br />
<%= f.text_area :content %>
</div>
<div class="actions">
<%= f.submit %>
</div>
<% end %>
Here's the Posts Controller as a whole
class PostsController < ApplicationController
# GET /posts
# GET /posts.json
def index
#posts = Post.paginate(page: params[:page])
respond_to do |format|
format.html # index.html.erb
format.json { render json: #posts }
end
end
# GET /posts/1
# GET /posts/1.json
def show
#post = Post.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html # show.html.erb
format.json { render json: #post }
end
end
# GET /posts/new
# GET /posts/new.json
def new
#post = Post.new
respond_to do |format|
format.html # new.html.erb
format.json { render json: #post }
end
end
# GET /posts/1/edit
def edit
#post = Post.find(params[:id])
end
# POST /posts
# POST /posts.json
def create
#post = Post.new(params[:post])
respond_to do |format|
if #post.save
format.html { redirect_to #post, notice: 'Post was successfully created.' }
format.json { render json: #post, status: :created, location: #post }
else
format.html { render action: "new" }
format.json { render json: #post.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
end
end
end
# PUT /posts/1
# PUT /posts/1.json
def update
#post = Post.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
if #post.update_attributes(params[:post])
format.html { redirect_to #post, notice: 'Post was successfully updated.' }
format.json { head :no_content }
else
format.html { render action: "edit" }
format.json { render json: #post.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
end
end
end
# DELETE /posts/1
# DELETE /posts/1.json
def destroy
#post = Post.find(params[:id])
#post.destroy
respond_to do |format|
format.html { redirect_to posts_url }
format.json { head :no_content }
end
end
end

Answer 1

To prevent XSS attacks Rails escapes html by default. If you don't want your html escaped you have to use .html_safe on the string you don't want escaped. In show.html.erb:
<%= #post.content.html_safe %>
Or a better way would be not to enter <p>'s in your content field and use simple_format to do the formatting into paragraphs, like this:
<%= simple_format(#post.content) %>
Of course you could also use a combination of both. E.g. when you have omitted paragraph tags, but do have links in your content:
<%= simple_format(#post.content.html_safe) %>
Note that you can safely use .html_safe on content you entered yourself, but don't use it on content that is entered by third parties (like comments) for that would open up your site to XSS attacks.

Answer 2

Mischa's answer led me down a rabbit hole of searching, and I also found this gem -- https://github.com/spohlenz/tinymce-rails
It adds TinyMCE, a wysiwig editor to a textarea