How to render <br> tags actually as line breaks in Yii2 mpdf

Question

I have this in one of my models:

public function getDispname() {
    return $this->step . '<br>' . $this->pm->dispname;
}

In the View (_pdf.php) I'm calling it inside of a Gridview. When I'm generating a pdf about this in the controller:

$pdf = \Yii::$app->pdf;
$pdf->content = $this->render('_pdf', [
    'model' => $model,
]);
$pdf->render();

I'm getting this result:

7. - sometext<br>sometext

Obviously I would like to have an actual line break there instead of a <br> tag:

7. - sometext
sometext

Can you please tell me how can I make mpdf to render <br> tags as line breaks?

Answer 1

The text for columns in GridView are automatically encoded.

So to render html you need to format this column as raw text.

<?= GridView::widget([
    'dataProvider' => $dataProvider,
    'columns' => [
        ...
        // a column with html inside as raw text
        [
            'attribute' => 'content',
            'format' => 'raw', // this will enable html output
        ],
        ...
    ],
]); ?>