Ruby on Rails

 I have a helper like this:

  def table_elements(qualifier, count)
    if qualifier
      yield
    else
      return ("<td></td>" * count).html_safe
    end
  end
 

Then if I do this, what I want to happen is if resp is not null then it yields the block, otherwise it
yields two empty table cells.

<%= table_elements(resp,2) do %>
  <td><%= resp.remittance_id %></td>
  <td><%= resp.availability_date %></td>
<% end %>


 Since I have read alot of rails books and blogs and never seen anything quite this odd, I suspect someone will suggest an alternate way of doing this but at the moment I can't think of anything different. This helper almost works the way intended, but for some reason 3 extra ending tags </td> are getting thrown into the beginning of the page ..