Question

I’m trying to display emails with IMAP. When the email is text though, the newlines \n don’t display properly. I’d rather not convert them to breaks < br /> because if the user wanted to reply to that email, it would now be in HTML instead of plain text. Is there perhaps a javascript function that could display it as a line break without changing the code?

Answer 1

How about HTML/CSS? If you put your text inside a <pre> tag, it will show all newlines exactly as they were. Alternatively, you can achieve the same effect by applying the CSS style white-space:pre to any element.

Don’t forget to HTMLencode it still (< to < etc.), otherwise it will all break apart at the first angle bracket.