Newline not preserved when reading from Textarea

My java webapp fetches content from a textarea, and e-mails the same.

The problem I'm facing is that the newline character in the textarea message is not preserved when reading the same using

request.getParameter("message");

Any clues how it can be tackled?

TIA.

EDIT:

The content in the textarea is:

abcd

abcd

CODE:

String message = request.getParameter("message");

        System.out.println("index loc for message "+message+" using \\r\\n : "+message.indexOf("\r\n"));
        System.out.println("index loc for message "+message+" using \\n : "+message.indexOf("\n"));
        System.out.println("index 开发者_StackOverflow社区loc for message "+message+" using \\r : "+message.indexOf("\r"));
        System.out.println("index loc for message "+message+" using \\n\\r : "+message.indexOf("\n\r"));

OUTPUT:

index loc for message asdfasdf using \r\n : -1

index loc for message asdfasdf using \n : -1

index loc for message asdfasdf using \r : -1

index loc for message asdfasdf using \n\r : -1

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That completely depends on how you're redisplaying it.

It sounds like that you're redisplaying it in HTML. "Raw" newlines are not part of HTML markup. Do a rightclick, View Page Source in webbrowser. You'll see linebreaks over all place. Usually before and/or after HTML tags.

In order to visually present linebreaks in the HTML presentation, you should actually be using <br> tags. You can replace newlines by <br> strings as below:

message = message.replace("\n", "<br>");

This is only sensitive to XSS attack holes if the message is an user-controlled variable, because you have to present it unescaped in JSP (i.e. without <c:out>) in order to get <br> to work. You thus need to make sure that the message variable is sanitized beforehand.

Alternatively, you can also set CSS white-space property there where you're redisplaying the message to pre. If you'd like to wrap lines inside the context of a block element, then set pre-wrap. Or if you'd like to collapse spaces and tabs as well, then set pre-line.

<div id="message"><c:out value="${message}" /></div>

#message {
    white-space: pre-line;
}

This will display the text preformatted (as a textarea by default does).

---

Two possible problems:

• The text in the textarea is word wrapped and doesn't really have any newlines.

• The String you get with getParameter() contains newlines (\n) but no carriage returns (\r) as expected by many email programs.

As a first step, I'd try dumping the retrieved String in a way you can check for this. You could write to a file and use od or a hex editor to look at the file, for example.

If it turns out you're simply missing CRs, you could do some simple regexp-based replacement on the string to fix that.

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Searching the ASCII codes i found that the new line is not defined like the often \n, instead is defined like \r\n.

Regards.

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You need to encodeURIComponent() before submitting the form and decodeURIComponent() on the server side.