How Do You Embed a Link in a Gettext String When Using Phoenix EEX Templates?

Question

When using I18n.t to embed a link in Rails, one could do something like this in an ERB:

<% link_destination = link_to(I18n.t(".link destination", "https://destination.url")) %>
<%= I18n.t(".translated text with %{link}", link: link_destination) %>

But when I do something like this in a Phoenix / Elixir EEX:

<% link_destination = link(gettext("link destination"), to: "https://destination.url")
<%= raw(gettext("translated text with %{link}", link: link_destination)) %>

I get the error:

(Protocol.UndefinedError) protocol String.Chars not implemented for {:safe, [60, "a", [[32, "href", 61, 34, "https://destination.url", 34]], 62, "link destination", 60, 47, "a", 62]} of type Tuple.

So how do I embed a URL in a Gettext translation?

Answer 1

The error indicates that we need to convert the output of the Phoenix.HTML.link/2 function to a string. To do this, we can add an intermediary call to Phoenix.HTML.safe_to_string/1 to convert the output to a string that will be embedded.

So the previous example ends up looking something like this:

<% link_destination = safe_to_string(link(gettext("link destination"), to: "https://destination.url"))
<%= raw(gettext("translated text with %{link}", link: link_destination)) %>