Question

I have a string that has new lines in. I am wanting to convert these to HTML <br>s, but I’m having a hard time detecting them.

Imagine a JavaScript string set like this:

var foo = "Bob
is
cool";

They are the kind of new lines that I need to detect. They aren’t using the \n special character – they are just plain format.

Answer 1

The reason it is not working is because javascript strings must be terminated before the next newline character (not a \n obviously). The reason \n exists is to allow developers an easy way to put the newline character (ASCII: 10) into their strings.

When you have a string which looks like this:

//Note lack of terminating double quote
var foo = "Bob 

Your code will have a syntax error at that point and cease to run.

If you wish to have a string which spans multiple lines, you may insert a backslash character ‘\‘ just before you terminate the line, like so:

//Perfectly valid code
var foo = "Bob \
is \
cool.";

However that string will not contain \n characters in the positions where the string was broken into separate lines. The only way to insert a newline into a string is to insert a character with a value of 10, the easiest way of which is the \n escape character.

var foo = "Bob\nis\ncool.";