4.1EA2 User-Defined-Report strips CRLF when using PL/SQL DBMS Output

Question

Hi,
I have a report with a child report.
That child report uses pl/sql to print to the screen. (dbms output)
When i use the procedure manually it prints fine.
When i copy this output to a text editor i can see the CRLF in there.
If i call the same procedure tru the reports section of SQLDeveloper the output is stripped of any CRLF characters.
This is causing it to be useless for me: i am using it to generate code and it all appears as one big line on the screen.
Copying this to a text editor indeed shows all CRLFs gone.
Is this intentional or a bug ?

Answer 1

Jeff,
Thnx for the answer.
I don't have a problem writing html in my code being a former webdeveloper with experience in apex as well.
The problem is that the option presents itself as a standard plsql dbmsoutput, which suggests identical output as a dbmsoutput pane in sqldeveloper.
From your answer i gather it really is supposed to do html formatting.
Your "solution" of inserting br tags would be fine if it weren't for the fact that when i do a copy of the output in this report pane sqldeveloper strips away the br tags but doesn't replace them with crlf's.
And since the crlfs that were in the output are also stripped in this result pane i get a single line of text when i copy over a page of text from the result pane into a normal texteditor.
As such it behaves differently then say a browser when i copy a page of text from the browser and paste it in a text editor. There i see the crlfs that were present in the original source.
Is there a listing somewhere that explains what tags are supported?
Or CSS ?
Does it support stuff like white-space: pre ?
I understand the usefullness of a html-aware plsql dbmsoutput output option in the reports list of a user-defined report.
However i would like to use this opportunity to advocate to include , as an extra option or tick box etc., an option to just display the output as the normal dbmsoutput pane displays it.
That is without extra formatting.
I like the idea of being able to click in the table section above and to have bottom pane generate the appropriate code as output.
That  use-case can not happen right now since it formats as html (and not even the correct way) or, when going along with this route, strips everything to a single line of text when copying the data from the result pane.
rgrds mike