jQuery textarea append newline behavior

Question

I'm trying to append a strings which end in newlines to a textarea using jQuery. However, different newline tokens show different behavior in Firefox3.5 and IE8, and I can't seem to find a way to use something that works for both browsers.

• \n works in FF but not in IE
• <br/> and \r\n work in IE but not in FF
• No luck using <pre></pre> tags either

I've seen info on the IE innerHTML issue but I'm not exactly sure how to best approach this problem in jQuery. Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Not sure how you are setting the textarea content, but if you use the jQuery val method, \n works consistently in Firefox and IE (Including IE8):

var txt = $("textarea#idhere");
txt.val( txt.val() + "\nSomething here\n\nAgain");

Causes the textarea to display:

Existing content
and linebreaks if any.
Something here

Again

You can see a demo here that works in FF and IE8: Demo | Source