Convert textarea value to something suitable for span

I have data taken from a textarea an开发者_运维技巧d put into a database. It is then returned from the database, and I want to put it into a span tag with the formatting still intact. Is there a method that does this? I have tried

.Replace("\r\n", "<br />")

which fixes the line breaks, but that still leaves the whitespace and.. I am sure there has to be a built-in method somewhere.

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Easiest solution is to mark your span as pre-formatted:

<span style="white-space:pre">text from textarea here</span>