Question

I have the following div in UIWebView:

<div contenteditable="true"></div>

If the user inserts new line (using the return key in the visual keyboard), and when he is done he clicks on done in the previous/next/done grey visual keyboard, it combines the lines to one line.

How can I avoid it?

Answer 1

Perhaps this JSFiddle can shed some light onto what’s happening within your application. If you type some lines in the top DIV (gray background color), the HTML code that you get as the return value of its innerHTML property will first display in a textarea field below it (including HTML tags formatting). As you will soon see it’s not merely what you’d expect to handle in your application (‘line one’ + CRLF + ‘line two’…), but it also contains HTML elements separating lines one from another. That’s how browsers are able to display contenteditable DIVs as if they’re ‘memo’ type controls – by parsing their HTML (that’s what browsers do). This HTML formatted text is also how your application receives user submitted text, and there you have to decide what to do with this formatting. You can either strip them away (which is, I suspect, how you set that object’s property and it deals with that for you) replacing HTML elements like <DIV></DIV> and so on with a space character, or choose (with your control’s property, or in code) to handle this formatting whichever way you’d like them to be handled. I’m not familiar with UIWebView though, and you’ll have to find on your own how to retrieve complete HTML formatted values that you want to apply to the next DIV element that you’re displaying (or same one that you’re assigning new values to).

UPDATE: After searching the web for UIWebView reference, I’ve actually stumbled across one related thread on SO that shows how to retrieve innerHTML value of an element in your underlying HTML document:

//where 'wView' is your UIWebView

NSString *webText = [wView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.getElementById('inputDIV').innerHTML"];

This way you’d be able to retrieve the whole innerHTML string contained within the contenteditable DIV that you use in a webText string variable and parse its HTML formatted text to whatever suits your needs better. Note though, that different browsers format contenteditable DIVs differently when Enter Key is pressed and some will return the next line enclosed in a new DIV, while others might enclose it in paragraph P and/or end the line with a break <BR> or <BR />, when shift+enter were used together to move to the next line. You will have to account for all these possibilities when processing your input string. Refer to the JSFiddle script I wrote using your UIWebView component to check what formatting applies.

Of course, in your case, it might be simpler to replace your contenteditable DIV with a textarea that will return more commonly formatted \n end-of-line (CR+LF). DIVs however are easier to design, so choose whichever suits your needs better.

Cheers!