How to add line breaks to an HTML textarea

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.

The problem comes from the fact that line breaks (\n\r?) are not the same as HTML <br/> tags:

var text = document.forms[0].txt.value;
text = text.replace(/\r?\n/g, '<br />');

Since many of the comments and my own experience have shown me that this <br> solution is not working as expected, here is an example of how to append a new line to a textarea using '\r\n':

function log(text) {
	var txtArea;

	txtArea = document.getElementById("txtDebug");
	txtArea.value += text + '\r\n';
}

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.

You need to use \n for linebreaks inside textarea

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.

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>

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 />');

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.

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

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>