Sanitization

Sanitization makes it easy to store slightly cleaner strings to your database.

Features

White space stripping
White space squishing (multiple consecutive spaces combined into one)
Blank string to nil (if database column supports it)
Change casing (ie. upcase, downcase, titlecase, etc)
Global substitution of regex (gsub)
Removing a specified pattern
Rounding decimal places
Truncating large strings
Before and after callbacks
User defined Sanitizers

Installation

bundle add sanitization

Usage

# Custom Sanitizer. See use down below with attribute 4
class SsnSanitizer < Sanitization::EachSanitizer
  # Strips all dashes from a provided string.
  #
  # @param record [ActiveRecord] the record being sanitized
  # @param attribute [Symbol] the name of the attribute being sanitized
  # @param value [Object] the value being sanitized
  #
  # @return sanitized_value [Object] the sanitized value to be stored in the attribute
  def sanitize_each(record, attribute, value)
    value.gsub(/-/, '')
  end
end

class MyCustomModelSanitizer
  def sanitize(record)
    record.attribute_5 = some_complex_logic(record.attribute_5)
  end
end

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Single sanitizer
  sanitizes :attribute_1, strip: true

  # Using `sanitize` instead of `sanitizes
  sanitize :attribute_2, strip: true

  # Multiple sanitizers
  sanitizes :attribute_3,
    case: :up|:down|:camel|:snake|:title|:pascal, # Converts to different cases
    gsub: { pattern: /[aeiou]/, replacement: '*' }, # Replaces all occurences of a pattern
    nullify: true, # Converts empty/blank strings to null
    remove: /[aeiou]/, # Removes all occurences of a pattern
    round: 2, # Rounds a float to the given number of decimal places
    squish: true, # Removes surrounding and internal consecutive whitespace characters
    strip: true, # Removes surrounding whitespace
    truncate: 50, # Truncates values to a given length

  sanitizes :attribute_4, ssn: true, # Custom sanitizer declared by SsnSanitizer

  sanitizes_with MyCustomModelSanitizer

  # Supports lifecycle hooks
  before_sanitization :pre_log
  after_sanitization  :post_log

  def pre_log
    puts "About to start running sanitization..."
  end

  def post_log
    puts "Finished running sanitization!"
  end
end

Built-in Sanitizers

Sanitization comes with a few built-in sanitizers. They include:

case
gsub
nullify
remove
round
squish
strip
truncate

See above for usage examples. If these aren't sufficient for your needs then we recommend creating your own custom sanitizers either for a specific field or for an entire model. Both are supported.

We recommend storing custom sanitizers in the app/sanitizers directory in your rails app.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.