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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T15:02:42+00:00

I have a UTF8 text string that I would like displayed in a div

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I have a UTF8 text string that I would like displayed in a div (or the entire <body>) in a web page according to the following rules:

  • All characters should be shown literally as they would in a unicode-aware text editor.

  • Whitespace should not be ignored. TABs should indent to some number of spaces (4 or 8 for example). LFs should cause a line break.

  • Text should be automatically word wrapped (as it would for a normal <p> paragraph, or as it would in a text editor with word wrap turned on) as the width of the containing div of the text file changes.

Clearly I need to perform some preprocessing steps on the text string before I insert it into the web page (perhaps I need to replace certain characters with named entities &foo;. Perhaps I need to surround the text file with a certain tag, <pre> for example, etc).

Precisely what preprocessing steps do I need to perform to achieve the above. If there are multiple sets of steps that achieve the above, than please answer with the shortest/simplest.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    (1) and (3) are actually quite simple, if you serve your document as UTF-8 and you’re fine with supporting IE >= 8. Then it’s:

    <body style="white-space: pre-wrap">
  (Your String here, '<' and '&' encoded to '&lt;' and '&amp;' respectively)
</body>

    The white-space CSS property is the key here.

    For (2) you will either need a pre-processing step (a la s/\t/ /g) or wait until all browsers support tab-size.

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