{
  "id": 2041922,
  "title": "Bolting a rich-text editor onto a column full of plain text",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/19/bolting-a-rich-text-editor-onto-a-column-full-of-plain-text",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-19T23:22:44.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/nasrulhazim/bolting-a-rich-text-editor-onto-a-column-full-of-plain-text-10o5"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "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.",
  "summary": "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…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}