Place HTML in a Rails Helper

Question

So i have an input for a simple_form like this:

<%= f.input :preferred_locale, collection: languages_available, label: "Choose Language", selected: current_user.preferred_locale, include_blank: false %>

So this creates a dropdown with languages available in the project. Languages available is an array like this, placed in a rails helper (extension.rb, only ruby, file):

def languages_available
    [
      ["English", 'en'],
      ["Spanish", 'es'],
    ]
end

The thing is want to display an icon right next to the language displaying the country flag. Thing is, in helpers you cant write html. No problem, i know the existence of html_safe, so in the collection i did something like:

<%= f.input :preferred_locale, collection: languages_available.map { |e| e.map(&:html_safe) }, label: "Choose Language", selected: current_user.preferred_locale,include_blank: false %>

So this marks as html_Safe every substring. With this i never see anything, and i am trying something as simple as putting in the array

def languages_available
    [
      ["<b>English</b>", 'en'],
      ["Spanish", 'es'],
    ]
end

the thing is something is working since i only see "English" and not "< b> English < /b>" as plaint text, but im not seeing the word in bold font so i dont know whats wrong.

edit: thank you for the answers, seems like in collection, which generates a select tag, is not possible to use html since it only supports text, i'll have to find another way of accomplishing this.

Answer 1

I don't think that you can do it in Html, options are not customizable, but maybe u can use a list, and with css and/or js customize to do a dropdown, I know that exist a lot of libraries to do it.

Here you have an example: https://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss_dropdown_button

Another thing maybe is use emojis with the flags, I never tried but maybe you can put it plain text and with some library automatically convert it to an emoji.