If you have a <textarea name="content"> field in your form and you use {{ $post->content }} in your Blade template to display the $post->content field, you’ll notice that none of the line breaks are retained when the field is rendered on the page.
For example, text entered into a <textarea> like this:
The plants and flowers
I raised about my hut
I now surrender
To the will
Of the wind
Will be displayed on your page like this:
The plants and flowersI raised about my hutI now surrenderTo the willOf the wind
That does not do the Ryokan poem justice.
To fix our line break issue, replace {{ $post->content }} with {!! nl2br(e($post->content)) !!}
Let’s break that down working from the most inner function out to the wrapping Blade statements.
We first wrap $post->content with the escape function e(). The Laravel e() function runs PHP’s htmlspecialchars function with the double_encode option set to false. Laravel Documentation
Next we have nl2br() which inserts HTML line breaks (ie. <br> tags) before all newlines in a string. PHP Documentation
Lastly, we change our Blade statement from {{ ... }} to {!! ... !!} which disables the escaping of data between the curly braces. But we’ve already escaped the data using the e() function.
Important – If you choose to prevent escaping by using the {!! ... !!} statement, be sure to escape your data before rendering it on the page… or else.
Now your line breaks are retained.