Carriage return in text area

Question

I have to allow the user to enter carriage returns in text areas; something like:

Sentence 1
Sentence 2
...

I have to persist those carriage returns when loading and saving data. I use jQuery on the client side, and .NET on the server. Any suggestions on how to approach?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You don't need to do anything special. That's what <textarea>s do, and unless you make a specific effort to strip out the newlines on the server side you'll load the save them with a standard string no problem.

Answer 2

If by "persist" the line breaks (CRLF) you mean that you want to display it properly, as SO does, you need to remeber to replace the CRLF pair with <br/>CRLF.

Otherwise, all your text will appear sequentially.