Is there an easy way to show a multi-line Custom Label in a Visualforce page with the line breaks working correctly?

Question

I'm looking to display a Custom Label on a Visualforce page, however when the Custom Label has line breaks in it, they're not coming through to the Visualforce page.

If I inspect the html, the line breaks aren't there either, so using a <pre> as suggested in How to show the multi-line string in wrapper class in a VF page won't work.

From what I can see, this behaviour is different to a standard Object's text field that contains line breaks.

The only way I can think of it is to add a method in the controller that updates the string with <br /> elements, and it's the output of that method that's displayed rather than the Custom Label itself.

Has anyone come across this or have any other suggestions for a more straight forward solution?

The purpose of this is to display an address on multiple different visualforce pages that is likely to change, hence using a Custom Label rather than embedding it directly in the page.

Answer 1

This is something which cannot be achieved by purely using custom labels. Any line breaks in the custom label is lost and the text is displayed as a single line on VF page.

This is what I do.

Split the string with any random character.

If the custom label is 'This is Line One. This is Line Two', I will change it to 'This is Line One. 555 This is Line Two'.

Replace '555' with any random character that you find it easy to remember.

String s = Label.YourLabelName;
List<String> l = s.split('555');

l[0] will contain the first sentence and l[1] will contain the second sentence. Use this list on VF page.

Answer 2

You can achieve it via:-

1. Apex :- replace newline character by html line break (< br/>) and use the resultant string value to display on page

   String displayValue = System.label.label_name.replace('\n','
   ');

2. Javascript :- Use javascript to replace newline character by html line break

< div id="testDiv" > < /div>

    <script>
          var val = '{!JSENCODE($Label.test_label)}';
          val = val.replace(/\n/g,'<br\>');
          document.getElementById('testDiv').innerHTML = val; //for testing purposes
    </script>

Answer 3

Use < br > tag as line break in custom label and Use escape = false attribute of outputtext. So custom label can be : "Hi,< br > Thanks for your Order" and below will render it in two lines.

<apex:outputText value="{!$Label.logi_Greeting}" escape="false"></apex:outputText>

Please note the associated risk with this attribute as documented:

Be aware that setting this value to "false" may be a security risk because it allows arbitrary content, including JavaScript, that could be used in a malicious manner.