React display line breaks from saved textarea

Question

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?

Answer 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>