Question

I have some text in a variable sometext which I want to assign to div using $('div').text(sometext);. The problem is that all <br/>s in sometext turn into < br/ >. I cannot use $('div').html() because there’s a lot of internal structure that I want to retain within the div, so I can only use the .text() function.

So once I’ve passed the text over the to the div, is there any way to change the encoded <br/> tag into a real line break in HTML? I mean something like this:

$('div').convertMyBRsToHTML();

Answer 1

Your requested function should look like this:

$.fn.convertMyBRsToHTML = function(text){
    this.text(text);
    this.html(this.html().replace(/&lt;br\s*\/&gt;/g,'<br/>'));
    return this;
}

Now you could use by:

$(YOUR_SELECTOR).convertMyBRsToHTML("<b>Some</b> new text.<br />next line<br />and so on");