Question

I’m currently using a regular expression to convert a textarea value’s new lines to <p> tags, this newly formatted block of text is then inserted on the page and it’s working fine. The block of text can be re-edited though, i.e. putting the block of text back in to the textarea for editing. Is there a regular expression I can use to replace the <p> tags with new lines again, so that the spacing is preserved as they’re editing the text within the textarea?

(This is to be used with JavaScript / jQuery).

Answer 1

I suggest you leverage jQuery’s queries to get the contents of each <p>, and then join them with \n:

function getTexts(selector) {
  var textContents = $(selector).map(function(i, item) {
    return $(item).text();
  });

  return textContents.join("\n\n");
}

$("#theTextarea").val(getTexts("#someContainer > p"));