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

While this doesn't quite meet all your requirements — for one thing it doesn't handle tabs, I've used the following gem, which adds a wordWrap() method to Javascript Strings, on a couple of occasions to do something similar to what you're describing — so it might be a good starting point to come up with something that also does the additional things you want.

//+ Jonas Raoni Soares Silva
//@ http://jsfromhell.com/string/wordwrap [rev. #2]

// String.wordWrap(maxLength: Integer,
//                 [breakWith: String = "\n"],
//                 [cutType: Integer = 0]): String
//
//   Returns an string with the extra characters/words "broken".
//
//     maxLength  maximum amount of characters per line
//     breakWith  string that will be added whenever one is needed to
//                break the line
//     cutType    0 = words longer than "maxLength" will not be broken
//                1 = words will be broken when needed
//                2 = any word that trespasses the limit will be broken

String.prototype.wordWrap = function(m, b, c){
    var i, j, l, s, r;
    if(m < 1)
        return this;
    for(i = -1, l = (r = this.split("\n")).length; ++i < l; r[i] += s)
        for(s = r[i], r[i] = ""; s.length > m; r[i] += s.slice(0, j) + ((s = s.slice(j)).length ? b : ""))
            j = c == 2 || (j = s.slice(0, m + 1).match(/\S*(\s)?$/))[1] ? m : j.input.length - j[0].length
            || c == 1 && m || j.input.length + (j = s.slice(m).match(/^\S*/)).input.length;
    return r.join("\n");
};

I'd also like to comment that it seems to me as though, in general, you'd want to use a monospaced font if tabs are involved because the width of words would vary with the proportional font used (making the results of using of tab stops very font dependent).

Update: Here's a slightly more readable version courtesy of an online javascript beautifier:

String.prototype.wordWrap = function(m, b, c) {
    var i, j, l, s, r;
    if (m < 1)
        return this;
    for (i = -1, l = (r = this.split("\n")).length; ++i < l; r[i] += s)
        for (s = r[i], r[i] = ""; s.length > m; r[i] += s.slice(0, j) + ((s =
                s.slice(j)).length ? b : ""))
            j = c == 2 || (j = s.slice(0, m + 1).match(/\S*(\s)?$/))[1] ? m :
            j.input.length - j[0].length || c == 1 && m || j.input.length +
            (j = s.slice(m).match(/^\S*/)).input.length;
    return r.join("\n");
};