I'm doing:
alert($("#div").text());
on something like this:
<div id="div">
<div>
Some text
<div>
</div>
Why the escaped content? Because it is sometimes malformed and I don't want it interfering with or breaking the rest of the document.
In FF it shows up preserving newlines. In IE7 it doesn't. I need to preserve the white space. This content is actually going in a textarea for editing.
And before anyone recommends a rich text editor, this code isn't really HTML. It's a custom dialect.
So how do I keep the newlines in IE?
It looks like this is my problem: The Internet Explorer innerHTML Quirk:
However, innerHTML has a problem in
Internet Explorer.
The HTML standard requires a
transformation on display of content.
All kinds and amounts of adjacent
whitespace are collapsed into a single
space. This is a good thing - just as
an example, it allows me to add a lot
of line breaks into this source file
without having to worry about weird
line breaks in the displayed text.
Internet Explorer applies these
transformations on assignment to the
innerHTML property. This seems like a
good idea: it saves a little time
during display, because if the
in-memory representation is already
normalized, then the browser doesn't
have to normalize whenever it needs to
display the text.
There are exceptions to the
normalization rule, though. Notably,
these are the <textarea> element, the
<pre> element and, in CSS-aware
browsers, elements with any value but
normal for the white-space property.
Internet Explorer does not respect
these special cases. The third makes
their optimization a bad idea, because
white-space might change at runtime,
for example through the DOM. In any
case, Internet Explorer will normalize
all assignments to the innerHTML
property, thus causing the effect
demonstrated below.
This text fills the textarea at page
load. This, too, contains line breaks
and multiple spaces. Formatting is
preserved here as well, except that
the UA may break lines.
(emphasis added)
And indeed if I change it to:
<div id="div">
<pre>
...
</pre>
</div>
and
$("#div pre").text()
or simply:
<style type="text/css">
#div { white-space: pre }
</style>
it all magically works.
Not sure if this would help, but maybe you could try this:
#div {
white-space: pre;
}
See here for a workaround:
The hack is to first clone the element
you want the contents of, using
cloneNode().
Next you create a <pre>
element with
createElement(), and then append your
cloned node to it.
Now you can get the innerText of that
create <pre>
element, and just delete
the temporary objects. You now have
whitespace preserved text :)
var cloned = targetElement.cloneNode(true);
var pre = document.createElement("pre");
pre.appendChild(cloned);
var textContent = pre.textContent ?
pre.textContent : pre.innerText;
delete pre;
delete cloned;
The reason I clone the element is
because the appendChild() would pull
it out of the DOM and it's pain the
re-insert back at the correct position
in the DOM.
Hopefully this helps a few people out
there :)