Preserving newlines in Textarea

[Tom Katz]

JSP contains textarea that can display data with various types of newlines (CR, LF, CR/LF). All various types of newline display fine, the problem is when the data is edited and the form posted.

The only situation where there's an issue is when message data contains '0A' (LF) by itself. On posting the form, these are converted to 'ODOA' (CR/LF). I only see this in Internet Explorer, it does not seem to happen in Firefox.

I've tried to no avail:
* grabbing the value/innerText/innerHTML values
* cloning the textarea element and grabbing that clone's innerText
* setting style=white-space:pre;
* changing the Page/Browser encoding values

Anyone know of way to preserve original newline bytes in IE as I described?

thanks in advance,
Tom

[Tom Katz]

Clarification: the conversion does not happen on post, that just happened to be when I noticed it. Actually, there's a difference in IE vs. Firefox for displaying '\n'. Firefox's textarea contains only '\n' (0a), while IE will expand it to '\r\n' (0d0a).

[Bear Bibeault]

I do not believe that you will be able to change IE's behavior. You'll just have to detect and deal with the differences.

[Tom Katz]

Thanks - that's what I was afraid of.