In recent versions of Sitecore – at least 8.2 and some versions of 8.1 – line breaks in multi-line fields are not rendered as <br/> tags when output on a page although they are supposed to.

@Html.Sitecore().Field("Multi line field")

When outputting fields like above it runs the renderField pipeline to get the content of the field.

You can force the correct behavior adding the linebreaks parameter.

@Html.Sitecore().Field("Multi line field", new { linebreaks = "<br/>" })

This will now work as expected and render all line breaks as the value of that parameter – <br/>. You can use anything you like here. When the parameter is not there, it is supposed to fall back to using <br/>, but it currently doesn’t.

Sitecore is tracking this bug by reference number 95002.

Workaround/solution

It’s pretty easy to fix though. One way (as the supplied fix by Sitecore) is to replace the GetMemoFieldValue processor in the renderField pipeline with a fixed version, which falls back to using <br/> if the linebreaks parameter is null.

public class GetMemoFieldValue
{
    public void Process(RenderFieldArgs args)
    {
        switch (args.FieldTypeKey)
        {
            case "memo":
            case "multi-line text":
                string linebreaks = args.RenderParameters["line-breaks"] 
                                    ?? args.RenderParameters["linebreaks"])
                                    ?? "<br/>";
                args.Result.FirstPart = GetMemoFieldValue.Replace(args.Result.FirstPart, linebreaks);
                args.Result.LastPart = GetMemoFieldValue.Replace(args.Result.LastPart, linebreaks);
                break;
        }
    }

    private static string Replace(string output, string linebreaks)
    {
        output = output.Replace("\r\n", linebreaks);
        output = output.Replace("\n\r", linebreaks);
        output = output.Replace("\n", linebreaks);
        output = output.Replace("\r", linebreaks);
        return output;
    }
}

Then you just replace the existing GetMemoFieldValue processor with the fixed on with a config patch.