Question

I have a Javascript routine that retrieves the selection text by a user formatted as HTML:

function getHTMLOfSelection() {
    var range;
    if (document.selection && document.selection.createRange) {
        range = document.selection.createRange();
        return range.htmlText;
    }
    else if (window.getSelection) {
        var selection = window.getSelection();
        if (selection.rangeCount > 0) {
            range = selection.getRangeAt(0);
            var clonedSelection = range.cloneContents();
            var div = document.createElement('div');
            div.appendChild(clonedSelection);
            return div.innerHTML;
        }
        else {
            return '';
        }
    }
    else {
        return '';
    }
}

With the fiddle, make sure and select the quoted text first:

http://jsfiddle.net/userdude/Y4BBq/13/

The code works fine, however, the selection includes a \r\n after every </p> and <br/>.
Why are these added and at what point? It seems redundant, as the <p> and <br> tags already include the new line.

Answer 1

As per OP’s comment, if you want to return the HTML without line breaks, you can just use a regex to globally replace the Carriage Return (\n) and Line Feed (\r) characters by empty strings:

//apply this to remove line breaks from your strings, where str is the string
str = str.replace(/\n|\r/g, '');
//or directly in the return inside of your functions:
return range.htmlText.replace(/\n|\r/g, '');
return div.innerHTML.replace(/\n|\r/g, '');

This will remove all line breaks, beware that the HTML will lose readability if you select a long part of document.

JSFiddle