JavaScript replace \n with <br /> [duplicate]

Question

var messagetoSend = $.trim(document.getElementById("msgText").value); messagetoSend = messagetoSend.replace("\n", "<br />"); alert(messagetoSend); 

Given input:

Line 1   Line 2     Line 3 

This alerts:

Line 1<br />   Line 2     Line 3 

When I expect it to alert:

Line 1<br /><br /><br />Line 2<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Line 3 

Answer 1

You need the /g for global matching

replace(/\n/g, "<br />");

This works for me for \n - see this answer if you might have \r\n

NOTE: The dupe is the most complete answer for any combination of \r\n, \r or \n

var messagetoSend = document.getElementById('x').value.replace(/\n/g, "<br />");  console.log(messagetoSend);

<textarea id="x" rows="9">      Line 1                  Line 2                              Line 3  </textarea>

UPDATE

It seems some visitors of this question have text with the breaklines escaped as

some text\r\nover more than one line"

In that case you need to escape the slashes:

replace(/\\r\\n/g, "<br />");

NOTE: All browsers will ignore \r in a string when rendering.