React display line breaks from saved textarea

Using Facebook React. In a settings page, I have a multiline textarea where a user can enter multiline text (in my case, an address).

<textarea value={address} />

When I try to display the address, so something like {address}, it doesn't show the line breaks and is all on one line.

<p>{address}</p>

Any ideas how to solve this?

Solution 1:

There's no reason to use JS. You can easily tell the browser how to handle newline using the white-space CSS property:

white-space: pre-line;

pre-line

Sequences of whitespace are collapsed. Lines are broken at newline characters, at <br>, and as necessary to fill line boxes.

Check out this demo:

<style>
  #p_wrap {
    white-space: pre-line;
  }
</style>

<textarea id="textarea"></textarea>
<p id="p_standard"></p>
<hr>
<p id="p_wrap"></p>
<script>
  textarea.addEventListener('keypress', function(e) {
    p_standard.textContent = e.target.value
    p_wrap.textContent = e.target.value
  })
</script>

Solution 2:

This is to be expected, you would need to convert the new line (\n) characters to HTML line breaks

An article about using it in react: React Newline to break (nl2br)

To quote article:

Because you know that everything in React is functions, you can't really do this

this.state.text.replace(/(?:\r\n|\r|\n)/g, '<br />')

Since that would return a string with DOM nodes inside, that is not allowed either, because has to be only a string.

You then can try do something like this:

{this.props.section.text.split(“\n”).map(function(item) {
  return (
    {item}
    <br/>
  )
})}    

That is not allowed either because again React is pure functions and two functions can be next to each other.

tldr. Solution

{this.props.section.text.split(“\n”).map(function(item) {
  return (
    <span>
      {item}
      <br/>
    </span>
  )
})}

Now we're wrapping each line-break in a span, and that works fine because span’s has display inline. Now we got a working nl2br line-break solution

Solution 3:

The solution is to set the property white-space on the element displaying the content of your textarea:

white-space: pre-line;