Make it easier to render newlines in markdown

This isn’t a bug, but rather a potential source of confusion. (I was confused, at least.)

In markdown, if you want a newline in your text, simply putting a newline character in is not enough. You have to put two whitespace characters at the end of the previous line.

import streamlit as st
st.write("Not multi-\nline")
st.write("Still not multi- \nline")
st.write("Ok now it's multi-  \nline")

Apparently this is part of the spec, so maybe we shouldn’t do anything here. But it seemed confusing enough to be worth noting.

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[JMBurley]

+1 for this issue. st.write() not handling text like a python print statement is, at best, confusing.

At worst it severely impacts streamlit interoperability with pre-existing python codebases. Any string you might want to print that works fine in normal python workflows may not render correctly in st.write().

print

print("line 1\n line 2\n line 3")

line 1  
line 2  
line 3

print("line 1 \n line 2 \n line 3")

line 1  
line 2  
line 3

st.write

st.write("line 1\n line 2\n line 3")

line 1  line 2  line 3

st.write("line 1 \n line 2 \n line 3")

line 1  
line 2  
line 3

(for clarity: need a double-whitespace before \n to get a newline in st.write for streamlit1.1.0)

[jrieke]

Related: #5170 mentions that multiple “\n” don’t produce multiple newlines. Slighlty different but it’s also related to markdown parsing of new lines, so keeping this in here.