Question

I have a textareaField in Silverstripe Backend in Edit Page View… The text to insert contains linebreaks. If I save the Page the text shows correctly with linebreaks in the textareaField. The linebreaks are for sure saved correctly to the database. But how do I display the text correctly in the frontend? It´s always outputted without linebreaks in a single line.

I tried already $Text.RAW, $Text.XML,… nothing works.

Thanks for the help,
Kind regards,
Florian

Answer 1

Assuming that you are using 3.0 this is a bug. You can see it here http://open.silverstripe.org/ticket/7596

A work around is to write your own function calling nl2br on your text field.

Here is an example:

public function NiceDescription () {
     return (nl2br  (Convert::raw2xml ($this->Description), true));
}

You can replace “Description” with the name of your text property.

Then in your template file if you need to display the description field you will call the function:

$NiceDescription