Preserve multiple spaces in a row in JIRA issues

[Steven Tran]

In a JIRA issue description, any number of sequential spaces will be collapsed into a single space.

E.g., "this          sentence has 10 spaces between the first two words"

I pressed the spacebar 10 times after typing "this" in that sentence. There should be 10 spaces between "this" and "sentence" but JIRA automatically collapses them into a single space.

None of the style options seems to preserve spaces. I am using JIRA v6.4.12 and the preformatted, paragraph quote, and block quote style options all collapse spaces.

I need to preserve spaces because I often paste stack traces into issue descriptions. The spaces for formatting make stack traces much easier to read.

Is there a way to force JIRA to display spaces as-is?

[TõnisO · Accepted solution]

Wrap the text in 

{noformat} OR {code}

tags, like so:

this          sentence has 10 spaces between the first two words using {noformat}

this          sentence has 10 spaces between the first two words using {code}

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Indeed, it's not JIRA collapsing the spaces, it's HMTL standards being implemented by your browser.  The noformat and code macros tell JIRA to serve up non-breaking spaces instead of plain ones.

[No]

Pasting text still removes all extra spaces :(

[No]

Solved, switch from visual mode to text using the tab at the bottom of your comment

[Luiz Leite (Kayo)]

At comments {noformat} or {code} doesn't work =\

Anyone know how to do it at comments?

[David Fitzjarrell]

{noformat}

    Text

{noformat}

[Paul Jones]

The {code} and {noformat} tags do work for me but I haven't figured out a method for my desired behavior which is simply to get   style whitespace in conjunction with some other formatting like text colors.

It seems to work OK when entering the text manually from the Visual tab but when I programatically submit it via the REST API the whitespace gets collapsed.

In the description field, I'm looking to do something like this:

label one:                 Value1
another long label:  Value2

But even when I use the unicode 0x00A0 (non breaking space) it collapses to this:

label one: Value1
another long label: Value2

When I view the text tab, the multiple white space padding characters are still present... they just render as a single space. 

When using {code} or {noformat} it encloses the content with a big gray block and doesn't support any color or bold formatting within.  I'm hoping to avoid the gray block, use colors, preserve whitespace.

Any ideas?

Tried the {{ monospace }} formatting tags, tried using various flavors of unicode whitespace (0x00A0).