Multiline textbox - spaces added to beginning on postback

Question

I have a Textbox added to an .ascx control page as follows:

<asp:TextBox id="txtDescription" runat="server" Width="500" TextMode="MultiLine" Rows="2"></asp:TextBox>

And it would show something like this when first loaded (4 spaces at the start included):

    Description goes here

Put simply, it's a Multiline Textbox with 2 lines. However, whenever we do a Postback to the server, when the page reloads, we get this:

        Description goes here

Another Postback.

            Description goes here

And so on. Basically, every time the page is refreshed after a Postback, it adds 4 spaces to the start of the textbox. On some pages, this isn't an issue, however, if the user is entering a fair bit of data into a Gridview or some other Control, the contents of the Textbox can end up shunted 20 or so characters to the right, sometimes out of the bounds of the Textbox.

Put simply, this is an issue for our company, as it is occurring across all of our pages. One of our clients has several times made a pass "...and could you do something about the spaces at the beginning of the textboxes at some point?"

Now, a temporary fix we have employed is the following code in our PageLoad function, however, we are still left with 4 spaces at the beginning of the Textbox. And rolling it out across 100's of .ascx and .aspx controls/pages isn't really a solution.

if (IsPostBack)
     txtDescription.Text = txtDescription.Text;

Now the big question is, does anyone know how to remove these mysterious 4 spaces that keep getting added to the start of a Multiline Textbox?

Answer 1

A typical html textarea (multiline textbox) looks like this:

<textarea>This is some content</textarea>

Now if your output looks like:

<textarea>
    This is some content
</textarea>

Then you will introduce your space issue. When you save this content you gain the 4 spaces at the beginning (the indentation). Now you load those 4 spaces back and suddenly you have 8 spaces: 4 from the markup and 4 from the saved content. This pattern continues each time you save the content.

I am unfamiliar with how you (ASP Web Forms) are generating your content, but this should give you a point of investigation.