Question

Using this strips my newLine characters

Is there an alternative to this that will render html?

 function viewCommentToggle( comment )
{
    theRow = document.getElementById("id"+comment.id);

    idx = 2;


        // Comment field
        cell = theRow.cells[idx];
        while( cell.childNodes.length > 0 ) cell.removeChild(cell.childNodes[0]);

            element = document.createTextNode(comment.comment);

        cell.appendChild(element);


         }

This is what Im concered with:

element = document.createTextNode(comment.comment);

just a fyi….this is what I did and it worked:

    function viewCommentToggle( comment )
{
    theRow = document.getElementById("id"+comment.id);

    idx = 2;


        // Comment field
        //cell = theRow.cells[idx];
        // while( cell.childNodes.length > 0 ) cell.removeChild(cell.childNodes[0]);

        cell = $("#id"+comment.id+" > td:eq("+idx+")");
        $(cell).empty();

        $(cell).html( comment.comment == null ? "" : comment.comment.replace(/\n/g,"<br/>").replace(/\r/g,"") ); 

Answer 1

Newlines are only significant (AFAIK) within a <pre> block.

Outside of that, to force line breaks you’ll have to split your string into separate lines and then create a text node followed by a <br/> for each one, i.e. something like:

var lines = text.split('\n');
var parent = document.body; // the node you want to insert the string into
for (var i = 0; i < lines.length; ++i) {
    parent.appendChild(document.createTextNode(lines[i]));
    parent.appendChild(document.createElement('br'));
}

See http://jsfiddle.net/alnitak/WFTD6/