Rendering Plaintext as HTML maintaining whitespace – without

Question

Given any arbitrary text file full of printable characters, how can this be converted to HTML that would be rendered exactly the same (with the following requirements)?

Answer 1

The solution to do that while still allowing the browser to wrap long lines is to replace each sequence of two spaces with a space and a non break space.

The browser will correctly render all spaces (normal and non break ones), while still wrapping long lines (due to normal spaces).

Javascript:

text = html_escape(text); // dummy function
text = text.replace(/\t/g, '    ')
           .replace(/  /g, '  ')
           .replace(/  /g, '  ') // second pass
                                      // handles odd number of spaces, where we 
                                      // end up with " " + " " + " "
           .replace(/\r\n|\n|\r/g, '
');