Question

I have a simple textarea. Is it possible with jquery to add a ‘br’ when I hit the enter button?
I’ve read around here, and the only solution I see is to add a linebreak at the very end of the val().

But I need it to work on every enter press.

Answer 1

You can simply split on the line feed:

var content = $('#myTextBox').val();
var contentArray = content.split(/\n/);

and then spit each one out as a paragraph:

$.each(contentArray, function(){
   $('#previewArea').append('<p>' + this + '</p>');
});

If you’re just wanting to put the result into a database as you’ve stated, you can do the same but build it into a string for insersion:

var myOutputVar;
$.each(contentArray, function(){
   myOutputVar += this + '<br />';
});

Based on your comments it looks like you just need the br added when you insert the data into your database. I’m assuming that you’re doing this with an ajax post since you’ve tagged this as a jQuery question.

Either way, you can just send your data to the server and split it up there using your server side language of choice.