Preserving White Space and Line Breaks in HTML: A Guide

When rendering the description of a job obtained from a <textarea> field in a form and stored in a database, you may encounter issues with preserving white space and line breaks in the displayed content. This occurs because the description, when added to the page, is not interpreted as HTML, resulting in the browser not respecting the original formatting.

Naturally, you would want the output to resemble the original input, respecting the white space and line breaks. However, the browser’s default behavior does not adhere to this expectation. To achieve the desired outcome, you can make use of a CSS instruction: white-space: pre-wrap.

In the context of frameworks like Tailwind CSS, the whitespace-pre-wrap class corresponds to the CSS instruction that achieves the desired effect of preserving white space and line breaks.

By applying the white-space: pre-wrap CSS instruction or utilizing the whitespace-pre-wrap class in Tailwind CSS, you can successfully preserve white space and line breaks in the rendered HTML. This will ensure that the displayed content maintains the original formatting, providing a better user experience.

Image credit: Example screenshot

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tags: [“HTML”, “CSS”, “web development”, “formatting”]