How do I maintain paragraph formatting on textarea Guest Entries submission?

Question

I have set up a guest entries form that receives data from the textarea snippet below and saves it into a rich text field.

<textarea name="fields[comment]" placeholder="Join the discussion..."></textarea>

When I view the entry on the front-end there is no formatting, but on the backend there is formatting. Then when I save the entry on the back-end, suddenly there is formatting on the front-end.

Is there anyway to bypass having to re-save the entry to get the desired formatting?

Answer 1

RichText fields make use of the Redactor plugin library, which if I understand correctly, essentially parses line-breaks and wraps lines in properly formatted html <p> tags via javascript. However, when you save from the front-end, it doesn't have a chance yet to parse the data. Only when you view the data on the back-end and re-save does redactor get a chance to do it's thing.

• You could use redactor on the front-end, although this is not recommended for various reasons as described here.

• Or you could change the fieldtype to a regular textField and wrap everything in a <pre> tag in your template. <pre>{{ entry.myTextField }}</pre>

• Or you could parse the string yourself via javascript before submitting it, wrapping your own <p> tags (hopefully it won't get double encoded).

There might be other options as well.