Render a string in HTML and preserve spaces and linebreaks

Question

I have an MVC3 app that has a details page. As part of that I have a description (retrieved from a db) that has spaces and new lines. When it is rendered the new lines and spaces are ignored by the html. I would like to encode those spaces and new lines so that they aren't ignored.

How do you do that?

I tried HTML.Encode but it ended up displaying the encoding (and not even on the spaces and new lines but on some other special characters)

Solution 1

Just style the content with white-space: pre-wrap;.

div {
    white-space: pre-wrap;
}

<div>
This is some text   with some extra spacing    and a
few newlines along with some trailing spaces        
     and five leading spaces thrown in
for                                              good
measure                                              
</div>

Solution 2

have you tried using <pre> tag.

http://jsfiddle.net/NweRa/

Solution 3

You can use white-space: pre-line to preserve line breaks in formatting. There is no need to manually insert html elements.

.popover {
    white-space: pre-line;    
}

or add to your html element style="white-space: pre-line;"

Solution 4

You would want to replace all spaces with   (non-breaking space) and all new lines \n with <br> (line break in html). This should achieve the result you're looking for.

body = body.replace(' ', '&nbsp;').replace('\n', '<br>');

Something of that nature.

Solution 5

I was trying the white-space: pre-wrap; technique stated by pete but if the string was continuous and long it just ran out of the container, and didn't warp for whatever reason, didn't have much time to investigate.. but if you too are having the same problem, I ended up using the <pre> tags and the following css and everything was good to go..

pre {
font-size: inherit;
color: inherit;
border: initial;
padding: initial;
font-family: inherit;
}

View more solutions

Comments

[Dan dot net]

That would work, I guess I was thinking there would be something built in. Maybe I am over-thinking it.

[Developer]

As far as I've seen there is not, it's not much overhead to do a simple replace though. I don't think performance would be a problem.

[Dan dot net]

That displays the value in a fixed width font

[Dan dot net]

I guess the 'problem' with MVC is that if I change the string as you suggest it will display the ' ' instead of the spaces, unless I use @Html.Raw(). Then I have to be concerned about xss and the user entering bad html. I could however encode the strings on insert so that I could be less concerned about that.

[N30]

you can use css to change the style. i just wrote a really basic example. you can use <pre> tag or use css as per @pete's answer.

[Ryan Gates]

+1 This solution is clean, and I would recommend using SecurityElement.Escape Method with it.

[Will Schoenberger]

white-space: pre-line; if you don't want the first line of each paragraph indented.

[Yordan Georgiev]

and if it still does not look the way you want it check the white space between your html elements ( or the thingy which generates them - for example a vue template ) ...

[stevec]

Is there a way to get the white space after each line (as opposed to before)? I tried post-wrap but no luck. Also checked here but can't see anything obvious. Any ideas? pre-wrap creates unwanted space before the next in my case (the rest of the text is good though)

[pete]

@user5783745 by after each line, do you mean after the newline character or any trailing whitespace before the newline character?

[stevec]

The css class you provide completely solves the problem of new lines not rendering. But I seem to get a little white space before the text that has the css class applied to it. For example, suppose the text is just abcd. If I do not include the css class, the text "abcd" appears at a certain place on the page. But when I include the css class the text "abcd" appears slightly lower on the page. Is there a way to avoid this? (I'm also not sure if this minor issue is specific to my app, but the app is small so I suspect it may not be)

[pete]

@user5783745 I'd need to see a code example, can you post a new question with a code example or a fiddle?

[pete]

@user5783745 You have a trailing space and a newline immediately following the <div class="highlight due_regard"> (so it renders as <div class="highlight due_regard"> \n<div class="line-1">. You can see it when you "view source". If this is only a problem after the form, then you could just drop the br tag on L11, otherwise you'll want to change your render method to not emit any whitespace between the two divs (i.e., <div class="highlight due_regard"><div class="line-1">)

[stevec]

Thanks so much @pete. After I put the ruby code on the same line, the space goes away. Thanks so much! I would upvote this answer again if I could

[zcoop98]

This doesn't appear to answer or even address the question.

[steve]

"That displays the value in a fixed width font" ... just what I want :) Basically code.

[gre_gor]

This doesn't preserve the spaces.