How to output greek symbols in html using ruby on rails

Question

I want to take as input text that takes the full greek name for a letter and displays it as a single greek letter. e.g. take 'alpha' and replace it with α.

My code looks like this

def name(y1)
    "&#{y1};"
end

with the output put into a html page using erb, i.e.

<%= name('alpha') %>

but the result is displayed in the html as α . How do I make it display α?

Answer 1

Based on: Disable HTML escaping in erb templates The escaping occurs in the ERB so you need to specify that the string is safe in the ERB.

Try this:

def name(y1)
    "&#{y1};"
end

<%= name('alpha').html_safe %>