Rails 3: How to display properly text from “textarea”?

Question

In my Rails 3 application I use textarea to let users to write a new message in a forum.

However, when the message is displayed, all newlines look like spac

Answer 1

CSS-only option

I believe one of the easiest options is to use css white-space: pre-line;

Other answers also mentioned using white-space, but I think it needs a little more information:

In most cases you should probably choose pre-line over pre-wrap. View the difference here.

It's very important to keep in mind about white-space that you should not do something like this:

  <%= your.text %>

It will produce extra spaces and line-breaks in the output. Instead, go with this:

<%= your.text %>

HTML alternative

Another way is to wrap your text in

 tags. And last note on my CSS option is true here as well:



  
<%= your.text %>



Don't separate your text from 
 tags with spaces or line-breaks.


Final thoughts

After googling this matter a little I have a feeling that html-approach is considered less clean than the css one and we should go css-way. However, html-way seems to be more browser-compatible (supports archaic browsers, but who cares):

pre tag

white-space