jQuery text() and newlines

I want to be able to say

$(someElem).text('this\n has\n newlines);

and it renders with newlines in the browser. The only workaround I have found is to set the css property 'white-space' to 'pre' on someElem. This almost works, but then I have an annoyingly large padding between the text and the top of someElem, even when I set padding to 0. Is there a way to get rid of this?

It's the year 2015. The correct answer to this question at this point is to use CSS white-space: pre-line or white-space: pre-wrap. Clean and elegant. The lowest version of IE that supports the pair is 8.

https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/w/whitespace/

P.S. Until CSS3 become common you'd probably need to manually trim off initial and/or trailing white-spaces.

If you store the jQuery object in a variable you can do this:

var obj = $("#example").text('this\n has\n newlines');
obj.html(obj.html().replace(/\n/g,'<br/>'));

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<p id="example"></p>

If you prefer, you can also create a function to do this with a simple call, just like jQuery.text() does:

$.fn.multiline = function(text){
    this.text(text);
    this.html(this.html().replace(/\n/g,'<br/>'));
    return this;
}

// Now you can do this:
$("#example").multiline('this\n has\n newlines');

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<p id="example"></p>

Here is what I use:

function htmlForTextWithEmbeddedNewlines(text) {
    var htmls = [];
    var lines = text.split(/\n/);
    // The temporary <div/> is to perform HTML entity encoding reliably.
    //
    // document.createElement() is *much* faster than jQuery('<div></div>')
    // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/268490/
    //
    // You don't need jQuery but then you need to struggle with browser
    // differences in innerText/textContent yourself
    var tmpDiv = jQuery(document.createElement('div'));
    for (var i = 0 ; i < lines.length ; i++) {
        htmls.push(tmpDiv.text(lines[i]).html());
    }
    return htmls.join("<br>");
}
jQuery('#div').html(htmlForTextWithEmbeddedNewlines("hello\nworld"));

Alternatively, try using .html and then wrap with <pre> tags:

$(someElem).html('this\n has\n newlines').wrap('<pre />');

You can use html instead of text and replace each occurrence of \n with <br>. You will have to correctly escape your text though.

x = x.replace(/&/g, '&')
     .replace(/>/g, '>')
     .replace(/</g, '&lt;')
     .replace(/\n/g, '<br>');

Try this:

$(someElem).html('this<br> has<br> newlines);

I would suggest to work with the someElem element directly, as replacements with .html() would replace other HTML tags within the string as well.

Here is my function:

function nl2br(el) {
  var lines = $(el).text().split(/\n/);
  $(el).empty();
  for (var i = 0 ; i < lines.length ; i++) {
    if (i > 0) $(el).append('<br>');
    $(el).append(document.createTextNode(lines[i]));
  }
  return el;
}

Call it by:

someElem = nl2br(someElem);

Using the CSS white-space property is probably the best solution. Use Firebug or Chrome Developer Tools to identify the source of the extra padding you were seeing.

For me it works when using jquerys .html() function instead of .text() function. Then you can add <br/> for linebreaks.

var msg = someString + "<br/>" + anotherString;
$(elem).html(msg);