Can you make newline characters \n display as brea

Question

I'm trying to display emails with IMAP. When the email is text though, the newlines \n don't display properly. I'd rather not convert them to breaks < br /> because if the user wanted to reply to that email, it would now be in HTML instead of plain text. Is there perhaps a javascript function that could display it as a line break without changing the code?

Answer 1

white-space CSS works fine but for cross-browser compatibility

.abc {
  word-wrap: break-word;      /* IE 5.5-7 */
  white-space: pre-wrap;      /* Modern browsers */
}

Your Html

<div class="abc">
 Lorem 
 Ipsum 
 is 
 simply 
 dummy
</div>

MDN Source

Answer 2

How about HTML/CSS? If you put your text inside a <pre> tag, it will show all newlines exactly as they were. Alternatively, you can achieve the same effect by applying the CSS style white-space:pre to any element.

Don't forget to HTMLencode it still (< to < etc.), otherwise it will all break apart at the first angle bracket.

Answer 3

Just add this white-space css style property to render Multiline texts :

.multiline
{
   white-space: pre-wrap;
}

and then :

<div class="multiline">
  my
  multiline
  text
</div>

now newlines will render like br elements.