Bolting a rich-text editor onto a column full of plain text
Today's job: let people write email bodies with bold text, headings, links and inline images instead of a bare <textarea> . Straightforward feature. The interesting part is that the column already had a few hundred rows of plain text in it, written by the previous version of the same screen — and nobody wants a data migration on a body column they can't fully test. So the rule I set myself: no…
The task at hand involved converting a column predominantly filled with plain text into one that could accommodate rich text formatting, such as bold text, headings, links, and inline images. This transition was made feasible without requiring a data migration, as the database would retain the existing content and the application would determine the formatting format at the time of reading.
The core of this functionality lies in a predicate function named `email_body_is_html`, which uses a regular expression to check if the content contains HTML tags, thereby distinguishing it from plain text entered in a standard textarea.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
