Okay, I still don't understand why you have to add `html_safe` here, and it still seems like a very bad idea. It will allow html tags in the title, and keep Rails from escaping literal greater-than or less-than chars not intended as HTML tags. 

It ought to work to just let Rails do HTML-escaing as normal, without any manual `html_safe` or `strip_tags` or whatever. 

I am not clear on what problem you are trying to solve, why the straightfoward approach does not work.