What character represents a new line in a text area

Question

Just quick one  but want to make sure I m catching cross platform variations   I like to convert new lines entered into a text area into a  comma   so that the output can be represented on a single line  my question     Currently  sending from google chrome  when I view the value  I find it uses  r n for new lines  If I replace  r n I know it will work for chrome on windows 7  but what about other platforms  are there variations on what other browsers will insert as a new line inside a text area

User · Answer

By HTML specifications  browsers are required to canonicalize line breaks in user input to CR LF   r n   and I don   t think any browser gets this wrong  Reference  clause 17 13 4 Form content types in the HTML 4 01 spec   In HTML5 drafts  the situation is more complicated  since they also deal with the processes inside a browser  not just the data that gets sent to a server-side form handler when the form is submitted  According to them  and browser practice   the textarea element value exists in three variants     the raw value as entered by the user  unnormalized  it may contain CR  LF  or CR LF pair   the internal value  called    API value     where line breaks are normalized to LF  only   the submission value  where line breaks are normalized to CR LF pairs  as per Internet conventions

User · Answer

amp  10 - Line Feed and  amp  13  Carriage Return   These HTML entities  will insert a new line or carriage return inside a text area

User · Answer

It seems that  according to the HTML5 spec  the value property of the textarea element should return   r n  for a newline      The element s value is defined to be the element s raw value   with the following transformation applied       Replace every occurrence of a  CR   U 000D  character not followed by   a  LF   U 000A  character  and every occurrence of a  LF   U 000A    character not preceded by a  CR   U 000D  character  by a   two-character string consisting of a U 000D CARRIAGE RETURN  CRLF     U 000A  character pair    Following the link to  value  makes it clear that it refers to the value property accessed in javascript      Form controls have a value and a checkedness   The latter is only used   by input elements   These are used to describe how the user interacts   with the control    However  in all five major browsers  using Windows  11 27 2015   if   r n  is written to a textarea  the   r  is stripped   To test  var e document createElement  textarea    e value   r n   alert e value    n     This is true of IE since v9  Before that  IE was returning   r n  and converting both   r  and   n  to   r n   which is the HTML5 spec   So    I m confused   To be safe  it s usually enough to use   r  n  in regular expressions instead of just   n   but if the newline sequence must be known  a test like the above can be performed in the app

User · Answer

Talking specifically about textareas in web forms  for all textareas  on all platforms   r n will work   If you use anything else you will cause issues with cut and paste on Windows platforms   The line breaks will be canonicalised by windows browsers when the form is submitted  but if you send the form down to the browser with  n linebreaks  you will find that the text will not copy and paste correctly between for example notepad and the textarea   Interestingly  in spite of the Unix line end convention being  n  the standard in most text-based network protocols including HTTP  SMTP  POP3  IMAP  and so on is still  r n  Yes  it may not make a lot of sense  but that s history and evolving standards for you

[html] What character represents a new line in a text area

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