Replace line break characters with <br /> in ASP.NET MVC Razor view

Solution 1:

Use the CSS white-space property instead of opening yourself up to XSS vulnerabilities!

<span style="white-space: pre-line">@Model.CommentText</span>

Solution 2:

Try the following:

@MvcHtmlString.Create(Model.CommentText.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "<br />"))

Update:

According to marcind's comment on this related question, the ASP.NET MVC team is looking to implement something similar to the <%: and <%= for the Razor view engine.

Update 2:

We can turn any question about HTML encoding into a discussion on harmful user inputs, but enough of that already exists.

Anyway, take care of potential harmful user input.

@MvcHtmlString.Create(Html.Encode(Model.CommentText).Replace(Environment.NewLine, "<br />"))

Update 3 (Asp.Net MVC 3):

@Html.Raw(Html.Encode(Model.CommentText).Replace("\n", "<br />"))

Solution 3:

Split on newlines (environment agnostic) and print regularly -- no need to worry about encoding or xss:

@if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(text)) 
{
    var lines = text.Split(new[] { '\r', '\n' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
    foreach (var line in lines)
    {
        <p>@line</p>
    }
}

(remove empty entries is optional)