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How to add line breaks to any text field in Contentful

When creating content in Contentful, you may run into issues trying to get line breaks to render properly in text fields.


While you may be able to type a double line break, getting it to render properly becomes a bit more difficult.


Note: This guide is a bit technical and will require coding in React to accomplish.


So how should you go about specifying line breaks between lines of text in Contentful?


If you’re using React to create a Contentful web application, you have a few options. The first option will allow you to add line breaks for rich text fields, and the second will provide you the ability to add line breaks to regular text fields.


First Option

By default, Contentful will replace line breaks added to the Rich Text editor with /n. What you can do to convert these into line breaks is use the renderText option in the @contentful/rich-text-react-renderer to replace all instances of \n with a <br /> tag. 



const renderOptions = {
  renderText: text => {
    return text.split('\n').reduce((children, textSegment, index) => {
      return [...children, index > 0 && <br key={index} />, textSegment];
    }, []);
  },
};

This code example is taken directly from the @contentful/rich-text-react-renderer README on GitHub.


Second Option

Alternatively, you can add a <br/> character directly to your rich text fields and configure your front end to apply line breaks where it sees them. This can be in either rich text fields, or regular text fields.


This code looks something like this: 


const returnLineBreaks = (text: string) => {
  if(text.includes('<br/>')) {
    // Map through each segment of text around line breaks added:
    return text.split('<br/>').map((innerText: any, i: number) => {
      const lineBreakStyle = {
        display: 'block',
        minHeight: '24px'
      }
      // Return a span around each group of text:
      return (
        <span key={i} style={lineBreakStyle}>
          {innerText}
        </span>
      )
    })
  } else {
    // If there's no line breaks, just return the text as is:
    return text
  }
}

To enable this to be used in rich text fields, you can call the returnLineBreaks and pass strings from your rich text data received as the text parameter.


On the topic of extending the usability of Contentful fields, you'll likely want more than the native rich text styling that's provided out-of-the-box.


Maybe you have questions like this:




Almost every website made with Contentful will have UI that looks different than the native rich text rendering.


And if we're on the topic of extending rich text to add line breaks, I'd imagine you'll want to add alternative UI elements, too.


Learning the process of modeling components to enable alternate UI styles in rich-text fields will help you get to a better place with Contentful. One where you know precisely how to create components that reflect all of the UI styles you have.


This understanding will help you immensely as you grow your site with Contentful.


You can learn more about a process we've defined for effective content modeling below.









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