HTML pre element

The <pre> HTML element represents preformatted text which is to be presented exactly as written in the HTML file. The text is typically rendered using a non-proportional, or monospaced font.

Whitespace inside this element is displayed as written, with one exception. If one or more leading newline characters are included immediately following the opening <pre> tag, the first newline character is stripped. This transformation is done by the HTML parser and does not apply when using XHTML.

<pre> elements’ text content is parsed as HTML, so if you want to ensure that your text content stays as plain text, some syntax characters, such as <, may need to be escaped using their respective character references. See escaping ambiguous characters for more information.