mailto link multiple body lines

Question

You can use URL encoding to encode the newline as %0A.

mailto:[email protected]?subject=test&body=type%20your%0Amessage%20here

While the above appears to work in many cases, user olibre points out that the RFC governing the mailto URI scheme specifies that %0D%0A (carriage return + line feed) should be used instead of %0A (line feed). See also: Newline Representations.

1. Use a single body parameter within the mailto string
2. Use %0D%0A as newline

The mailto URI Scheme is specified by by RFC2368 (July 1998) and RFC6068 (October 2010).
Below is an extract of section 5 of this last RFC:

[...] line breaks in the body of a message MUST be encoded with "%0D%0A".
Implementations MAY add a final line break to the body of a message even if there is no trailing "%0D%0A" in the body [...]

See also in section 6 the example from the same RFC:

<mailto:[email protected]?body=send%20current-issue%0D%0Asend%20index>

The above mailto body corresponds to:

send current-issue
send index

To get body lines use escape()

body_line =  escape("\n");

so

href = "mailto:[email protected]?body=hello,"+body_line+"I like this.";

This is what I do, just add \n and use encodeURIComponent

Example

var emailBody = "1st line.\n 2nd line \n 3rd line";

emailBody = encodeURIComponent(emailBody);

href = "mailto:[email protected]?body=" + emailBody;

Check encodeURIComponent docs