[html] Render a string in HTML and preserve spaces and linebreaks

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)

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;"

As you mentioned on @Developer 's answer, I would probably HTML-encode on user input. If you are worried about XSS, you probably never need the user's input in it's original form, so you might as well escape it (and replace spaces and newlines while you are at it).

Note that escaping on input means you should either use @Html.Raw or create an MvcHtmlString to render that particular input.

You can also try

System.Security.SecurityElement.Escape(userInput)

but I think it won't escape spaces either. So in that case, I suggest just do a .NET

System.Security.SecurityElement.Escape(userInput).Replace(" ", "&nbsp;").Replace("\n", "<br>")

on user input. And if you want to dig deeper into usability, perhaps you can do an XML parse of the user's input (or play with regular expressions) to only allow a predefined set of tags. For instance, allow

<p>, <span>, <strong>

... but don't allow

<script> or <iframe>

Wrap the description in a textarea element.

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;
}

have you tried using <pre> tag.

http://jsfiddle.net/NweRa/

There is a simple way to do it. I tried it on my app and it worked pretty well.

Just type: $text = $row["text"]; echo nl2br($text);

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.