I would like to preserve the newlines in the input parameters of my tool. I already found out that I can preserve the other characters such as ^,@ and more using the following xml code. <inputs> <param name="input" type="text" area="true" size="40x80" label="some input"> <sanitizer> <valid initial="default"> <add preset="string.printable"/> <remove value="""/> <remove value="\"/> </valid> <mapping initial="none"> <add source="\" target="\\"/> <add source=""" target="\""/> </mapping> </sanitizer> </param> </inputs> But this makes it not possible to preserve newline characters, they are all still replaced by spaces.