jQuery text() and newlines

Solution 1:

It's the year 2015. The correct answer to this question at this point is to use CSS white-space: pre-line or white-space: pre-wrap. Clean and elegant. The lowest version of IE that supports the pair is 8.

https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/w/whitespace/

P.S. Until CSS3 become common you'd probably need to manually trim off initial and/or trailing white-spaces.

Solution 2:

If you store the jQuery object in a variable you can do this:

var obj = $("#example").text('this\n has\n newlines');
obj.html(obj.html().replace(/\n/g,'<br/>'));

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<p id="example"></p>

If you prefer, you can also create a function to do this with a simple call, just like jQuery.text() does:

$.fn.multiline = function(text){
    this.text(text);
    this.html(this.html().replace(/\n/g,'<br/>'));
    return this;
}

// Now you can do this:
$("#example").multiline('this\n has\n newlines');

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<p id="example"></p>

Solution 3:

Here is what I use:

function htmlForTextWithEmbeddedNewlines(text) {
    var htmls = [];
    var lines = text.split(/\n/);
    // The temporary <div/> is to perform HTML entity encoding reliably.
    //
    // document.createElement() is *much* faster than jQuery('<div></div>')
    // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/268490/
    //
    // You don't need jQuery but then you need to struggle with browser
    // differences in innerText/textContent yourself
    var tmpDiv = jQuery(document.createElement('div'));
    for (var i = 0 ; i < lines.length ; i++) {
        htmls.push(tmpDiv.text(lines[i]).html());
    }
    return htmls.join("<br>");
}
jQuery('#div').html(htmlForTextWithEmbeddedNewlines("hello\nworld"));