[Rails] Stories with many tags, tags with many stories, has_and_belongs_to_many howto?

[Iván Vega Rivera]

Hi,

I began experimenting with habtm relationships, and so I created a 
stories table, a tags table, and a stories_tags table referencing the 
former 2.

When I create a "story", I want to add several tags to it. Then, the 
model should create those tags and link them to the respective stories, 
and for the tags that already exists, just link them to the story.

I tried something like this (snippets):

class Tag < ActiveRecord::Base
    def self.create(taglist)
        tags = Array.new
        count = 0
        taglist.split(/,/).each do |tag|
            tags[count] = Tag.new(:name => tag.chop.downcase)
            count += count
        end
    end
end

class StoriesController < ApplicationController
  def create
    @tags = Tag.create(params[:tags][:tags])
    params[:story][:tags] = @tags
    @story = Story.new(params[:story])
    render_text @tags.length
  end
end

params[:tags][:tags] can be something like "cats, dogs, pets". With that 
code, I get: "Tag expected, got String".

I suppose I could save each tag individually, retrieve it's id, and 
create the rows in the link table, myself, but this is Rails, so I'm 
sure there's a much better way.

Could you help me out?

Thanks!

Ivan V.