Question

I created a html textarea with a capability to add “[” and “]” at the beginning and end of whatever text has been entered within that.

My problem is, when I enter some multiline data into the textarea, the regex is handled differently in ff and ie.

Input:

Iam
learning
regex

Expected Output: (I get this in FF )

[Iam]
[learning]
[regex]

Output in IE:

[Iam
][]
[learning
][]
[regex]

The Regex code is here:

(textareaIDelement.value).replace(/(^)(.*)(\n{0,})($)/gm, "[" + "$2" +"]");

I added the (\n{0,}) in the regex to match newlines.. but it doesn’t have any effect..

Thanks

Answer 1

In IE, the line separator in a textarea’s value property is \r\n. In all other major browsers it’s \n. A simple solution would be to normalize line separators into \n first. I’ve also simplified the regex:

textareaIDelement.value.replace(/\r\n/g, "\n").replace(/^(.*)\n*$/gm, "[$1]");