How Can I Preserve Spaces and Line Breaks When Rendering Strings in HTML?

Rendering Strings in HTML While Preserving Spaces and Line Breaks

When displaying strings retrieved from a database in an MVC3 app's detail page, it's common to encounter an issue where the new lines and spaces are ignored by default. This can make the rendered text visually unappealing and potentially affect the usability of the application.

To preserve these formatting elements, you need to ensure they are encoded correctly in the HTML. Unfortunately, using HTML.Encode may display the encoding itself, which is not the intended behavior.

The solution to this problem lies in styling the content using CSS. By setting the white-space property to pre-wrap, you instruct the browser to preserve the spaces and line breaks as intended. For instance:

div {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
}

Applying this CSS class to the element that displays the text will render it as follows:

<div>
  This is some text   with some extra spacing    and a
  few newlines along with some trailing spaces        
     and five leading spaces thrown in
  for                                              good
  measure                                              
</div>

By implementing this approach, you can effectively render strings in HTML while preserving their original formatting, ensuring readability and maintaining the desired visual appearance of your application's content.

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