Django template filters not working at all
Turns out this had nothing to do with Django itself, which is not surprising.
The data migration which happened between the last and current version broke the newlines in the raw data. Therefore the linebreaksbr was working, but didn't find any linebreaks.
Currently I have a working Django 1.9 application using Python 3.5 in development. The database is Postgres 9.4.2.0.
I have a TEXT type field in the database which contains raw input gathered from users, which is then rendered back for other users to read.
The raw text contains newlines and whatnot which look like: 

chat.freenode.net\r\n#randomchannel

The HTML template itself attempts to replace the line breaks with break tags and escape anything else

{{ post.body|linebreaksbr|escape }}

But it doesn't seem to matter what filters I add to the post.body, it always renders the raw \r\n and never replaces the values with <br> tags.
I am not getting any errors in the development server and the rendering of the template works fine, it just seems the filters are not working.
I'm pulling my hair our trying to work out why these filters are not working. Does anyone have any ideas?