How to retain carriage returns or line breaks in an ASP.NET web page

Many newcomers to web development cannot get their head around why the carriage returns they made in their data on input from a textarea, or from a text file, Excel spreadsheet etc. do not appear when the web page renders.

The solution is fairly obvious once the newcomer realises that a web page is only the browser's interpretation of html markup, and that a new line in html is represented by the <br /> tag. So what is needed is a way to swap carriage returns or line feeds with the <br /> tag. Well, a way to Replace() them, actually.

The string.Replace() method allows this, but we also need to identify what we want to replace with the html tag. How is a new line <linebreak> represented in C# or VB.Net?

In C#, it's "\r\n", while in VB.Net, it's vbcrlf. However, there is also a language independent option that does just the same thing: Environment.NewLine.

Date Posted: 06 April 2007 19:55
Last Updated: 30 May 2007 10:13
Posted by: Mikesdotnetting
Total Views to date: 7671

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Comments

08 January 2009 00:36 from Jack

Thanks for this article! it helped me a lot. I think i'll start coming here a lot earlier during my problem solving from now on.

24 July 2009 11:13 from Michael

Thanks a million! I've been using plugin's like tinymce or a customize TextArea just to replace the line breaks in a TextArea. I didn't know or ask enough about Environment.NewLine...great!

03 September 2009 15:01 from foo

I keep getting the following error: Microsoft VBScript compilation error '800a0414' Cannot use parentheses when calling a Sub /admin.asp, line 39 Eval(content).ToString().Replace(Environment.NewLine,"
")

04 September 2009 06:30 from Mikesdotnetting

@foo You get that error because you are not using ASP.NET. You are using classic ASP. They are totally different.

01 October 2009 14:16 from newbieweb

hey mike, actually i'm new to web and id like to know where can i exactly put your suggested code? i'm using detailsview and i wanted the data from sql to appear with linebreaks.. is it in a code behind or within the asp control? im using 3.5 by the way.. thanks in advance!

02 October 2009 11:19 from Mikesdotnetting

@newbieweb

You would put it in the aspx page as part of the control markup eg:

<asp:Label runat="server" ID="MyLabel" Text='<%# Eval("MyMultiLineValue").ToString().Replace(<linebreak>,"<br />") %>' />

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