Question

I am trying to find and replace line breaks in text using javascript.

The following works. It replaces the character a with the character z.

var text = "aasdfasdf";
text= text.replace(/a/g,"z");
alert(text);

The following based on other posts on this and other message boards does not. Basically the javascript does not fire:

var text = "aasdfasdf";
text= text.replace(/\n/g,"z");
alert(text);

…Here is one of many posts that suggests it should work.

JavaScript: How to add line breaks to an HTML textarea?

and by the way following does not work for me in Firefox either:

text = text.replace(/\n\r?/g, '<br />'); or
text = text.replace("\n", '<br />'); 

Note: I realize there are no line breaks in the text variable..I am just using a simple string for testing purposes.

Can anyone see what could be wrong or show me a way to do this that actually works.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I’d cover my bets by handling \r\n (the sequence), and then handling \r and \n through a character class, like this:

text = text.replace(/\r\n/g, '<br />').replace(/[\r\n]/g, '<br />');

The first replace turns the sequence \r\n into <br />. The second replace replaces any \r or \n characters found on their own with the string.

More on regular expressions in JavaScript here.