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FLAVIO COPES
flaviocopes.com
2026

Preserving white space and line breaks in a string in HTML

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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:

but I got this:

The solution was to add this CSS instruction:

white-space: pre-wrap;

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

Tagged: HTML ยท All topics
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