HTML Entities Break Line: Newlines, <br> and &NewLine;

Why an entity cannot do it

Entities produce characters, and HTML collapses whitespace characters — including newlines — into a single space when rendering. So even a real newline character in the source does not create a visible break.


 exists in HTML5 and produces U+000A, an actual line feed. In normal flow content it is collapsed like any other whitespace and shows nothing. It only becomes visible inside <pre> or with white-space: pre applied.

What to use instead

<br>                              <!-- a break within a line of text -->
<p>First</p><p>Second</p>         <!-- separate paragraphs -->
<pre>line one
line two</pre>                    <!-- source newlines preserved -->

.preserve { white-space: pre-wrap; }   /* honour newlines, still wrap */

For user-submitted text, white-space: pre-wrap is usually better than converting newlines to <br> — it keeps the stored text clean and avoids injecting markup.

Converting newlines safely

If you do need <br> tags, escape first and convert second, so the conversion cannot introduce markup from user input:

echo nl2br(htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));

Reversing that order lets a submitted <script> survive into the output. This ordering rule applies to any escape-then-transform pipeline.

The related entities

  prevents a break rather than causing one — useful in 10 kg or Fig. 3. ­ is a soft hyphen that only appears if the word actually wraps. <wbr> marks an optional break point in a long unbroken string such as a URL.

These control where breaks may happen. None of them force one.