Is it possible to convert a plain text field to a rich text field, without losing content?

Question

I originally had some content stored in a plain text field but I want to give my co-workers the ability to add anchor links, lists etc..

If I were to change the field type form Plaintext to Rich Text would I lose that content?

Also right now to output it, I am using the following :

<p>{{ entry.field }}</p>

so I would have to change that to just using

{{ entry.field }}

Will converting it to rich text, automatically add paragraph tags for me or would I have to go into each one and resave?

Answer 1

You should be OK converting your Plain Text to Rich Text. I've just tried it in my dev environment and everything was preserved.

Rich Text will add the paragraph tags as you suggest, so you'll want to remove them from your templates files as you mentioned.

If you're being cautious, you can take a backup of your database in the Settings section of your control panel before changing the field type. It only takes a few seconds, and that way, if anything goes wrong, you can restore.