How can I force MediaWiki to respect single line breaks?

Question

By default, MediaWiki ignores single line breaks, treating them as a single space. To insert a new line in a page, you must insert two consecutive line breaks in the source, which results in a new paragraph: </p><p>. It's also possible to insert <br /> directly into the source.

How can I modify the MediaWiki parsing engine so single line breaks in the source are replaced automatically with a <br /> in the resulting HTML?

(Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting)

Point taken – I've rephrased the question and said a prayer to St. Pedanticus. :) — meetar, Apr 29 '12 at 20:56
I've been thinking and there's one thing I can't grasp - what's wrong with the paragraph tags? — Jobjörn Folkesson, May 04 '12 at 18:56
It's a wiki for free verse. Paragraphs aren't semantically correct. — meetar, May 04 '12 at 22:19

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 18 '14 at 20:37

4

<pre></pre>

This html tag seems to do the job for me.

answered Aug 18 '14 at 20:37

Ryan

76
7

1

No, don't do this! Reason 1:

-blocks don't appear in normal formatting but wrapped in grey boxes. Reason2: You create -blocks in Mediawiki not by manually entering the tags but simply by beginning each line that should be wrapped in  with a single space.

– Jpsy Sep 15 '14 at 07:02

1
My purpose is to store some useful sql scripts on wiki. And copy/paste to from Sql Server or a text editor must be instant. No way I am going to insert html tags one way and remove them the other. And I don't want to install a poetic extension. Surrounding my code with
looks good and I don't care about the text being displayed in a box.
– pasx Dec 05 '14 at 00:01

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 05 '12 at 10:10

3

Use https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Poem

<poem>
Roses are red
Violets are blue
</poem>

answered May 05 '12 at 10:10

MaxSem

3,457
21
34

Jobjörn Folkesson · Answer 3 · 2012-04-30T08:45:18.520

2

You could write an extension that adds br tags to newlines when parsing the wikicode. However, you'd have to be very careful - you don't want every newline in the wikicode to actually be a br tag, do you?

Edit: you don't want every newline to be a br tag, because not every newline in the wikicode should actually be a linebreak. For example, a table:

{|
|+ The table's caption
|-
|Cell 1
|Cell 2
|-
|Cell A
|Cell B
|}

It would turn quite messy if you added br tags into the table code.

edited Apr 30 '12 at 08:45

answered Apr 29 '12 at 23:10

Jobjörn Folkesson

569
6
16

What are the downsides to converting newlines to
s? – meetar Apr 30 '12 at 00:46
2

The whole point of Wiki markup is to allow users to edit something that looks like text, instead of raw HTML. Adding
's to every single line defeats the point. – lambshaanxy Apr 30 '12 at 03:03
@meetar: for example, a table. I've edited the answer to provide an example. – Jobjörn Folkesson Apr 30 '12 at 08:45
1

@jpatokal: I suppose that is why the asker wants to have it done in the parser – Jobjörn Folkesson Apr 30 '12 at 08:46
@jpatokal Yes, I want to avoid HTML in the source. I've edited the question to clarify that point. – meetar Apr 30 '12 at 14:39

How can I force MediaWiki to respect single line breaks?

3 Answers3

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