title: Ruby/Rails - Properly Display/Format Text From The Text Area Form Control
body: <p>I have a interesting problem.  I have a :text field in my model with displays a large chunk of data, usually about three paragraphs.</p>
  
  <p>When I enter the text in on the new view it might look like....</p>
  
  <pre><code>aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
  bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb.
  ccccccccccccccccccccc.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Imagining that each a,b, or c is an individual paragraph.</p>
  
  <p>With a space between the a, b, and c lines....(e.g. the line break that occurs when you press enter) </p>
  
  <p>But when I display the very same data on the view, the line breaks are not recognized. The view seems to concatenate all the text into one big blurb and it displays like.....</p>
  
  <pre><code>aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb.ccccccccccccccccccccc.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But the line breaks are being recorded because going to edit shows the data in the format with the line breaks.</p>
  
  <p>I thought about adding &lt; p >'s into the text area and parsing the html on the view but that really isn't a good option since I dont want to require my users to insert html tags.</p>
  
  <p>Is there something I'm missing to get the text area to display in the same fashion as it was entered?</p>