Copy div HTML to textarea but keep line breaks

Question

I am working on a questionnaire application and one of the features is that the user can click on a question and and edit it. The problem I am having is converting a <br /> tag into a line break that my textarea will understand.

The save code looks as follows:

$('#questions').append("<div>"+$('textarea[name="question"]').val().replace(/\n/g, '<br />')+"</div");

This works perfectly! The code to convert it back looks like this:

$('textarea[name="question"]').val($('#questions').eq(1).html().replace(/<br\s*\/?>/mg,"\n"));

but for some reason the textarea will not accept the new lines and just bundles all of the text together.

How can I convert <br /> back into a new line feed that my textarea will understand?

Maybe [that answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/5959455/983992) helps — Marcel Gwerder, Apr 10 '13 at 14:00

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 10 '13 at 14:09

4

Try

$('textarea[name="question"]').val($('#questions').eq(1).html().replace(/\s*<br\s*\/?>\s*/g,"\n"));

Demo: Fiddle

answered Apr 10 '13 at 14:09

Arun P Johny

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This did exactly what I wanted it to do! Thank you so much! – Robert E. McIntosh Apr 10 '13 at 14:16

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

0

You'll need to convert the <br>'s into HTML encoded newlines.


 Line Feed and  Carriage Return. This way you are actually parsing the new line ("\n") rather than displaying it as text.

New line in text area

edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Community

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answered Apr 10 '13 at 14:03

Jazzepi

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Copy div HTML to textarea but keep line breaks

2 Answers2