Escape new lines with JS

Question

I have a string that looks something like this:

"Line 1\nLine 2"

When I call length on it, though, it's one character short:

"Line 1\nLine 2".length // 13

Looking a little closer:

"Line 1\nLine 2".charAt(6)

I find that the \n is being replaced by a single character, which looks like:

"
"

Is there a way to escape that new line into a \n?

Answer 1

Whenever you get Javascript to interpret this string, the '\n' will be rendered as a newline (which is a single character, hence the length.)

To use the string as a literal backslash-n, try escaping the backslash with another one. Like so:

"Line 1\\nLine 2"

If you can't do this when the string is created, you can turn the one string into the other with this:

"Line 1\nLine 2".replace(/\n/, "\\n");

If you might have multiple occurrences of the newline, you can get them all at once by making the regex global, like this:

"Line 1\nLine 2\nLine 3".replace(/\n/g, "\\n");

Answer 2

\n is the newline character. You can use "Line 1\\nLine 2" to escape it.

Keep in mind that the actual representation of a new line depends on the system and could be one or two characters long: \r\n, \n, or \r