IO.readlines with spaces included - Ruby on Rails

I'm new to Rails and I've a problem and I have no idea how to solve it. Tried with google but with no luck.

Basically I have a textfile that I use IO.readlines to read the file, put in an array and then have it printed out in my View. I got that working.

The problem is that the textfile I "read" have indentations and when I print it out in my view from the array the indentation spaces dont get included.

This is how the code looks like at the moment.

Controller

 @codefile = Codefile.find(session[:codefile_id]) 
  dir = @codefile.file.url.to_s 
  url = dirr.split("?")
  @fileLinesArray = IO.readlines('public' + url[0])

View

<ol>
<% @fileLinesArray.each do |x| %>
    <li><%= x %></li>
<% end %>
</ol>

Maybe I'm not even supposed to use readlines? Anyway...
Very thankfull for any help I can get!

Solution

Your problem is HTML ignores multiple spaces in code. If you check the HTML source you'll see the spaces are there but they aren't rendered.

You have to use the <pre> tag, which stands for "preformatted" to preserve whitespace:

<ol>
<% @fileLinesArray.each do |x| %>
    <li><pre><%= x %></pre></li>
<% end %>
</ol>

Also you'll probably want to change it to <%= x.chomp %> which will leave off the extra newline character.