jQuery javascript regex Replace <br> with \n

How do i write a regex to replace <br /> or <br> with \n. I'm trying to move text from div to textarea, but don't want <br>'s to show in the textarea, so i want to replace then with \n.

var str = document.getElementById('mydiv').innerHTML;
document.getElementById('mytextarea').innerHTML = str.replace(/<br\s*[\/]?>/gi, "\n");

or using jQuery:

var str = $("#mydiv").html();
var regex = /<br\s*[\/]?>/gi;
$("#mydiv").html(str.replace(regex, "\n"));

example

edit: added i flag

edit2: you can use /<br[^>]*>/gi which will match anything between the br and slash if you have for example <br class="clear" />

myString.replace(/<br ?\/?>/g, "\n")

True jQuery way if you want to change directly the DOM without messing with inner HTML:

$('#text').find('br').prepend(document.createTextNode('\n')).remove();

Prepend inserts inside the element, before() is the method we need here:

$('#text').find('br').before(document.createTextNode('\n')).remove();

Code will find any <br> elements, insert raw text with new line character and then remove the <br> elements.

This should be faster if you work with long texts since there are no string operations here.

To display the new lines:

$('#text').css('white-space', 'pre-line');