Best practices: displaying text that was input via multi-line text box

Posted by chris on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by chris
Published on 2010-06-09T14:59:22Z Indexed on 2010/06/09 15:02 UTC
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I have a multi-line text box. When users simply type away, the text box wraps the text, and it's saved as a single line. It's also possible that users may enter line breaks, for example when entering a "bulleted" lists like:

Here are some suggestions:
 - fix this
 - remove that
 - and another thing

Now, the problem occurs when I try to display the value of this field. In order to preserve the formatting, I currently wrap the presentation in <pre> - this works to preserve user-supplied breaks, but when there's a lot of text saved as a single line, it displays the whole text block as single line, resulting in horizontal scrolling being needed to see everything.

Is there a graceful way to handle both of these cases?

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