Sanity block content rendering spaces as &nbsp in Next.js with GraphQL

I can see you're hitting a common issue with the older block-content-to-react library! The good news is there's a straightforward solution, but first, an important heads-up: block-content-to-react is deprecated, and you should migrate to the newer @portabletext/react library, which is the officially supported solution.

The   Issue

The   (non-breaking space) problem you're seeing typically happens when there's HTML entity encoding happening in your render chain. The spaces in your Portable Text content are being converted to   entities, and then those entities are being displayed literally instead of being rendered as actual spaces.

Quick fix for block-content-to-react:

Try passing the serializers prop with a custom text serializer that handles the text nodes properly:

import BlockContent from '@sanity/block-content-to-react'

const serializers = {
  marks: {
    // Add any custom mark serializers you need
  }
}

<BlockContent 
  blocks={yourContent} 
  serializers={serializers}
  projectId="your-project-id"
  dataset="your-dataset"
/>

Make sure you're passing the projectId and dataset props to the BlockContent component - missing these can sometimes cause rendering issues.

Better Solution: Migrate to @portabletext/react

Since you just started this morning, now is the perfect time to switch to the modern approach! Here's how:

1. Install the new package:

npm install @portabletext/react

2. Update your component:

import { PortableText } from '@portabletext/react'

// In your component
<PortableText value={yourContent} />

The new library handles text rendering much more reliably and has better TypeScript support. If you need custom components (for images, code blocks, etc.), the syntax is slightly different:

const components = {
  types: {
    image: ({value}) => <img src={value.url} alt={value.alt} />
  },
  marks: {
    link: ({value, children}) => <a href={value.href}>{children}</a>
  }
}

<PortableText value={yourContent} components={components} />

Note the key differences when migrating from block-content-to-react:

• serializers → components
• node → value in your custom component props
• blocks → value as the prop name

Using with Next.js

Since you're fetching via GraphQL for static props, your setup should work fine with either library. Just make sure you're querying the Portable Text field correctly in your GraphQL query - it should return the full block array structure.

If you continue having issues after switching to @portabletext/react, check that your GROQ/GraphQL query is returning the Portable Text in its raw array format, not as a pre-serialized string.

Welcome to Sanity, and congrats on moving your portfolio to a proper CMS! 🎉