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I am loading some content inside an iframe. I want this content to behave as-if it was inside a <pre> tag - namely for it to respect line breaks. I am using javascript to set the style of the body element of this iframe.

I am wondering if it would be possible to set a particular style that will cause the body of this iframe to act like it's inside <pre/>.

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4 Answers 4

up vote 30 down vote accepted

you can find the default setting or how they're suppose to be at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/sample.html just apply the same style to the element you want to behave as a pre element and voila you're done

p.s. which is basically

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Try setting the element's white-space style to a value of pre.

body {
    white-space: pre;
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If you're only interested in preserving line breaks but not whitespace then I suggest using:

body {
    white-space: pre-line;

This will collapse multiple consecutive white space characters into one but preserve line breaks. The downside is that it's only supported in IE versions 8 and up.

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If you just want it to act on linebreaks like pre, use the css: white-space: pre

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