Linking offsite

When you get into something like Ruby on Rails you want to use it for everything - the old adage about getting a hammer and everything becomes a nail rings true in programming!

I wanted to link to Wikipedia. I thought I could use link_to for something like that, but it turns out that really link_to (and it's variations) are meant to link to something inside your RoR app, not outside of it.

So I wrote this handy method that generates a link off to Wikipedia.

def wikipedia_link(text, language = current_language.to_s)
  "<a href=\"http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php?search=#{h(text)}&amp;language=#{language}\" target=\"new\">Wikipedia</a>"
end

It's fairly simple - pass in the text you want to find on Wikipedia and your language.