Question

I’ve searched Stackoverflow for hours and hours, and nobody’s solution works in Internet Explorer 8.

I am provided with a plaintext document like this:

This is a legal agreement ("Agreement") between you and ...
License
Subject to you continued and ongoing compliance with the terms and conditions set ...
Restrictions
Except as otherwise explicitly provided in this Agreement, ...
Ownership
Except for this license granted to you, as between you and ...
Disclaimer of Warranties
Use at your own risk. ...

And I need to replace the newline characters (linebreaks, carriage returns, whatever you want to call them) with double linebreaks (<br/><br/>) to make the text look more normal.

The nl2br function from jQuery convert line breaks to br (nl2br equivalent) works fine in most browsers. However, a client of mine uses IE8.

Go ahead and try the nl2br function using IE8 (or a modern Internet Explorer set to IE8 mode); it doesn’t work.

Does anyone know why it doesn’t work in IE8? And how to accomplish the goal?

P.S. I put some code here http://jsfiddle.net/L2Ufj/2/ and oddly enough it works in IE8 via jsfiddle, but if you copy it to somewhere else and run it for real, it won’t work in IE8.

Answer 1

When you retrieve element’s innerHTML, IE will convert the innerHTML to a “standard-format” (by collapsing multi-spaces into one, removing linebreak, etc…) before giving you the result.

Thus, you can not find any linebreak character in the innerHTML you get with IE. What a bad news.

I think the most feasible & easy approach is to store your text inside <textarea> tag instead of normal <div>. IE will leave <textarea> alone when you get it’s value instead of innerHTML:

originalText=document.getElementById('EULA_content').value

Of course, when you get the newText, you should append it to another div element.