How to add line breaks to an HTML textarea

Question

I’m editing a <textarea> with JavaScript. The problem is that when I make line breaks in it, they won’t display. How can I do this?

I’m getting the value to write a function, but it won’t give line breaks.

Answer 1

If you use general JavaScript and you need to assign a string to a text area value, then document.getElementById("textareaid").value='texthere\\ntexttext'.

You need to replace \n or < br > with \\\n.

Otherwise, it gives Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL in all browsers.

Answer 2

You need to use \n for linebreaks inside textarea

Answer 3

I had a problem with line breaks which were passed from a server variable to a JavaScript variable, and then JavaScript was writing them to a textarea (using KnockoutJS value bindings).

The solution was double escaping new lines:

original.Replace("\r\n", "\\r\\n")

on the server side, because with just single escape characters, JavaScript was not parsing.

Answer 4

If you want to display text inside your own page, you can use the <pre> tag.

document.querySelector('textarea').addEventListener('keyup', function() {
  document.querySelector('pre').innerText = this.value;
});

<textarea placeholder="type text here"></textarea>
<pre style="font-family: inherits">
The
new lines will
be respected
      and spaces too
</pre>

Answer 5

I have a textarea whose id is #infoartist, as follows:

<textarea id="infoartist" ng-show="dForm" style="width: 100%;" placeholder="Tell your contacts and collectors about yourself."></textarea>

In JavaScript code, I’ll get the value of the textarea and replace escaping a new line (\n\r) by the <br /> tag, such as:

var text = document.getElementById("infoartist").value;
text = text.replace(/\r?\n/g, '<br />');

So if you are using jQuery (like me):

var text = $("#infoartist").val();
text = text.replace(/\r?\n/g, '<br />');

Answer 6

A new line is just whitespace to the browser and won't be treated any different to a normal space (" "). To get a new line, you must insert <BR /> elements.

Another attempt to solve the problem: Type the text into the textarea and then add some JavaScript behind a button to convert the invisible characters to something readable and dump the result to a DIV. That will tell you what your browser wants.

Answer 7

If you just need to send the value of the textarea to the server with line breaks, use nl2br.

Answer 8

Here is the thing I did for the same trouble I had.

When I'm passing the text to the next page in JSP, I’m reading it as a textarea instead of reading something like

<s:property value="%{text}"/>

so the output came as you wanted.

And for other properties, you can use it as below.

<textarea style="background-color: white; border: none; width:660px;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:1.0em; resize:none;" name="text" cols="75" rows="15" readonly="readonly" ><s:property value="%{text}"/></textarea>