# Preserving white space and line breaks in a string in HTML

> 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.

Author: Flavio Copes | Published: 2021-07-02 | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/html-preserve-white-space/

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](https://flaviocopes.com/images/html-preserve-white-space/Screen_Shot_2021-06-09_at_12.27.25.png)

but I got this:

![Same job description text collapsed into one continuous paragraph without line breaks](https://flaviocopes.com/images/html-preserve-white-space/Screen_Shot_2021-06-09_at_12.27.40.png)

The solution was to add this CSS instruction:

```
white-space: pre-wrap;
```

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