<p>I have saved input from a textarea element to a TEXT column in MySQL.  I'm using PHP to pull that data out of the database and want to display it in a p element while still showing the whitespace that the user entered (e.g. multiple spaces and newlines).  I've tried a pre tag but it doesn't obey the width set in the containing div element.  Other than creating a PHP function to convert spaces to &amp;nbsp and new lines to br tags, what are my options?  I'd prefer a clean HTML/CSS solution, but any input is welcome!  Thanks!</p>

You can cause the text inside the
```
pre
```
to wrap by using the following CSS
```
```
pre {
 white-space: pre-wrap;       /* css-3 */
 white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;  /* Mozilla, since 1999 */
 white-space: -pre-wrap;      /* Opera 4-6 */
 white-space: -o-pre-wrap;    /* Opera 7 */
 word-wrap: break-word;       /* Internet Explorer 5.5+ */
}
```
```
Taken from
this site
It's currently defined in CSS3 (which is not yet a finished standard) but most browsers seem to support it as per the comments.