Safely rendering newlines in HTML with CSS

We all know that if you are going to be rendering user provided content on a HTML page, it should be sanitized just in case they include a nasty script tag or something.

React will automatically sanitize any string being rendered to the screen unless you jump through hoops first - which is great because making this difficult means its somewhat harder to inadvertently create a XSS vulnerability.

However, if you get a string from a human source and want to display that in a div tag while maintaining its newlines, this becomes a little harder because you don’t want to replace all \n characters with <br /> tags because this would mean you would also need to disable the sanitizing.

There are some libraries to deal with this sort of thing that implement white listing of tags, etc.
Another alternative would be using something like Markdown.
Even a simple <pre> tag will get you pretty far, but today I read an article that shows how you can achieve this with a little CSS:

.pre {
  white-space: pre-line;
}

For more details, I recommend having a read of this article.