asked on 9/4/2010

Newline or Linebreak for Pasted Text in IE with Javascript

I have a JavasScript script that pastes a snippet of code or text with line breaks (/n/r) to a PRE, DIV, or TEXTAREA tag. The purpose is for the user to copy and paste the content to a text file.

When copying and pasting the snippet in FF, the pasted text properly has line breaks. When pasting the text from IE, all the text shows on one line.

How can I ensure that line breaks are not ignored when copying from IE and pasting in a text file?

See DevShed thread for further discussion.

JavaScript Web Development HTML

Last Comment

coldfusionwebdev

9/4/2010

HainKurt

9/4/2010

i cannot get the issue...

when you browse the code below, and copy paste it to notepad, i see it properly, also when i paste into text area it pastes properly...

<textarea cols=80 rows=20>
<pre>
Tags: 
internet explorer, carriage return, line break, copy, paste Add Tags    Add Tags
Zones: 
JavaScript, Miscellaneous Web Development, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
Author: 
strimp101, Premium Service Member
 Posted: 
03/09/10 09:26 PM
 Time Zone: 
Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-07:00)
</pre>
</textarea>

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coldfusionwebdev

9/4/2010

You can detect for IE and then use '\r' instead of '\r\n'

Samuel Liew

9/4/2010

You may need to convert newline characters (/n), (/r), or (/n/r) into copyable HTML tags like <br /> or <p>.

<script type="text/javascript">
var string = "this\ris\ra\rtest";
string = string.replace(/(\n\r|\n|\r)/g, "<br>");
document.write(string);
</script>

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strimp101

9/4/2010

ASKER

Using \r instead of \r\n does not solve the problem.

Take the following code

var txt = 'this is some text' + "\r\n";
txt = txt + 'this is additional text';

document.getElementById('somePreTag').appendChild(document.createTextNode(txt))

The PRE tag will contain:

this is some text
this is additional text

But if you copy and paste the text into Notepad for example, it will be

this is some textthis is additional text

I am creating snippets of text and code programmatically then assigning that text to the PRE tag.

http://forums.devshed.com/javascript-development-115/newline-or-linebreak-for-pasted-text-735111.html

strimp101

9/4/2010

ASKER

I have also tried converting the \n\r into <br> tags. This does not work either.