I was playing around with flask when I came across an odd problem with the '\n' character. it dosen't seem to have an effect in my browser, I tried putting
in there but it didn't work, any ideas?

from flask import Flask
from flask import render_template
test=Flask(__name__)
@test.route('/')
def root():str='yay\nsuper'return str
test.run(debug=True)

So it turns out that flask autoescapes html tags. So adding the <br> tag just renders them on screen instead of actually creating line breaks.

There are two workarounds to this:

1. Break up the text into an array

    text = text.split('\n')
   

   And then within the template, use a for loop:

    {% for para in text %}<p>{{para}}</p>{% endfor %}
   

2. Disable the autoescaping

   First we replace the \n with <br> using replace:

    text = text.replace('\n', '<br>')
   

   Then we disable the autoescaping by surrounding the block where we require this with

    {% autoescape false %}{{text}}{% endautoescape %}
   

   However, we are discouraged from doing this:

Whenever you do this, please be very cautious about the variables you are using in this block.

I think the first version avoids the vulnerabilities present in the second version, while still being quite easy to understand.