simpleton wrote in post #1118613:
There are quite a lot of line break issues with Rails on StackOverflow and the web in general. A lot of solutions are ugly and a lot modify simple_format so I've created a patch that I'd like to hear thoughts on before submitting a PR.
There are a lot of questions about this on Stack Overflow because a lot of people don't understand the basic rules of HTML. That's not the fault of simple_format, which IMHO works exactly as expected and intended.
I've made a slight modification to split_paragraphs and how it gsubs the newline characters in paragraphs up so that if you pass it a line option, instead of getting rid of all newlines and return carriage characters, it can substitute \r\n for an html break element.
I'm not familiar with split_paragraphs, and I don't see it listed when searching the Rails documentation, but my guess it that it also works as expected and intended.
This way if a saved chunk of text is the following then it won't be stripped down to just the 2 lines of text but will have the <br /> tags that were obviously intended:
"\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nBig gap.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nPlease."
But, that is the expected results for HTML to normalize white space into a single character. Changing this behavior would be unexpected and unintended, again IMHO.
This doesn't affect the regular behaviour of simple_format and will still return the usual result without the option.
I find that this isn't an edge case but is frequent enough to warrant this and not have people overriding simple_format and split_paragraphs in their application helper.
I think any behavior change to these helpers should be left up to the individual developers to put into their own helper libraries. I don't see a place for this in Rails itself. The simple_format helper already works as anyone who truly understands HTML expects it to work.
P.S. The proper line ending character is \n (stupid Windows...). That was a jest... sort of.
