Preserving white space and line breaks in a string in HTML

Jul 2, 2021

Learn how to preserve white space and line breaks in an HTML string with the CSS white-space pre-wrap property, or the whitespace-pre-wrap class in Tailwind.

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In a project I was rendering the description of a job which I got through a <textarea> field in a form, and I stored that in the database.

Now, this description was not interpreted as HTML, and when I added it to the page, the white space and line breaks were not respected by the browser.

I wanted this:

Job description text with proper line breaks and paragraph spacing preserved

but I got this:

Same job description text collapsed into one continuous paragraph without line breaks

The solution was to add this CSS instruction:

white-space: pre-wrap;

which using Tailwind corresponds to the whitespace-pre-wrap class.

Tagged: HTML · All topics

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