Splitting text in textarea by new lines (including empty lines) into javascript array

Question

I'm trying to split the text inside Splitting textarea data by new lines. My current code works, except for a small requirement: The resulting array must include empty lines as well.

<script>
$(function(){
    var lines = [];
    $.each($('#data').val().split(/\n/), function(i, line){
        if(line){
            lines.push(line);
        }
    });
    console.log(lines);
});
</script>


<textarea id="data">
I like to eat icecream. Dogs are fast.

The previous line is composed by spaces only.



The last 3 lines are empty.

One last line.
</textarea>

The current result is:

["I like to eat icecream. Dogs are fast.", " ", "The previous line is composed by spaces only.", "The last 3 lines are empty.", "One last line."]

What it should be:

["I like to eat icecream. Dogs are fast.", " ", "The previous line is composed by spaces only.", "", "", "", "The last 3 lines are empty.", "", "One last line."]

Answer 1

Your .split will include \n, but when line is falsey you can just push an empty string...

$(function(){
    var lines = [];
    $.each($('#data').val().split(/\n/), function(i, line){
        if(line){
            lines.push(line);
        } else {
            lines.push("");
        }
    });
    console.log(lines);
});

Here is a working example : JSFiddle

Output:

["I like to eat icecream. Dogs are fast.", 
"",  "The previous line is composed by spaces only.",  
"",  "",  "", 
"The last 3 lines are empty.",  
"",  "One last line."]

Or simply as comment above suggests (I had assumed that your example had been simplified and you need to do something else in the .each loop):

var lines = $('#data').val().split(/\n/);

JS Fiddle

Answer 2

In addition to geedubb's answer if you prefer to avoid using the backslash for encoding reasons:

var lines = $('#data').val().split(String.fromCharCode(10));