JavaScript string newline character?

Question

Is \n the universal newline character sequence in Javascript for all platforms? If not, how do I determine the character for the current environment?

I'm not asking about the HTML newline element (<BR/>). I'm asking about the newline character sequence used within JavaScript strings.

Answer 1

Yes, it is universal.

Although '\n' is the universal newline characters, you have to keep in mind that, depending on your input, new line characters might be preceded by carriage return characters ('\r').

Answer 2

Don't use \n, Just try this:

    var string = "this\
    is a multi\
    line\
    string";

Just enter a back-slash and keep on truckin'! Works like a charm.

Answer 3

Get a line separator for the current browser:

function getLineSeparator() {
  var textarea = document.createElement("textarea");
  textarea.value = "\n"; 
  return textarea.value;
}

Answer 4

I've just tested a few browsers using this silly bit of JavaScript:

function log_newline(msg, test_value) {
  if (!test_value) { 
    test_value = document.getElementById('test').value;
  }
  console.log(msg + ': ' + (test_value.match(/\r/) ? 'CR' : '')
              + ' ' + (test_value.match(/\n/) ? 'LF' : ''));
}

log_newline('HTML source');
log_newline('JS string', "foo\nbar");
log_newline('JS template literal', `bar
baz`);

<textarea id="test" name="test">

</textarea>

IE8 and Opera 9 on Windows use \r\n. All the other browsers I tested (Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5 on Windows, and Firefox 3.0 on Linux) use \n. They can all handle \n just fine when setting the value, though IE and Opera will convert that back to \r\n again internally. There's a SitePoint article with some more details called Line endings in Javascript.

Note also that this is independent of the actual line endings in the HTML file itself (both \n and \r\n give the same results).

When submitting a form, all browsers canonicalize newlines to %0D%0A in URL encoding. To see that, load e.g. data:text/html,<form><textarea name="foo">foo%0abar</textarea><input type="submit"></form> and press the submit button. (Some browsers block the load of the submitted page, but you can see the URL-encoded form values in the console.)

I don't think you really need to do much of any determining, though. If you just want to split the text on newlines, you could do something like this:

lines = foo.value.split(/\r\n|\r|\n/g);

Answer 5

Email link function i use "%0D%0A"

function sendMail() {   
var bodydata="Before "+ "%0D%0A";
    bodydata+="After"

var MailMSG = "mailto:[e-mail]" 
         + "?cc=[e-mail]" 
         + "&subject=subject" 
         + "&body=" + bodydata; 
window.location.href = MailMSG; 
} 

[HTML]

<a href="#" onClick="sendMail()">Contact Us</a>

Answer 6

You can use the ascii hex values, something like this(this worked for me):

 var string = "this %0d%0a is a multiline %0d%0a string";

The result will be:

this 
is a multiline 
string