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POPopulating Textareas with JavaScript
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  1. POPopulating Textareas with JavaScript
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    copied!<p>This is an extension of a <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8346198/javascript-escaping-form-values">previous question</a> I asked. I ran into some additional issues.</p> <p>I am loading a form with dynamic textarea boxes. Don't ask why, but I need to populate these fields using JavaScript (has to deal with AJAX stuff, etc). To simplify things, let's just say my textarea has a name of "myTextarea" and I want to populate with a request parameter "myRequestParam". So I'd want to do something like:</p> <pre><code>updateTextareaText("myTextarea", "${myRequestParameter}"); </code></pre> <p>From my previous question, I've found that this solves some issues:</p> <pre><code>updateTextareaText("myTextarea", unescape('&lt;c:out value="${myRequestParam}" /&gt;')); </code></pre> <p>I have tried a number of different implementations for <code>updateTextareaText</code>, but nothing seems to work. I need to handle both newlines and special characters.</p> <p><strong>Try #1</strong></p> <pre><code>function updateTextareaText(textareaElementName, newText) { var textareaBox = document.getElementsByName(textareaElementName)[0]; textareaBox.innerHTML = newText; } </code></pre> <p><strong>Try #2</strong></p> <pre><code>function updateTextareaText(textareaElementName, newText) { var textareaBox = document.getElementsByName(textareaElementName)[0]; textareaBox.value = newText; } </code></pre> <p><strong>Try #3</strong></p> <pre><code>function updateTextareaText(textareaElementName, newText) { var textareaBox = document.getElementsByName(textareaElementName)[0]; var existingNodes = textareaBox.childNodes; if (existingNodes.length &gt; 0) { textareaBox.removeChild(existingNodes[0]); } var newTextNode = document.createTextNode(newText); textareaBox.appendChild(newTextNode); } </code></pre> <p>All of the above loose newlines and/or displays some special characters as their escaped values. I've been using the following <code>myRequestParam</code> value for testing:</p> <pre><code>Test Newline and Special `~!@#$%^&amp;*()_+-={}|[]\:";'&lt;&gt;?,./ </code></pre> <p>Does anyone know the correct way to handle all of the different cases? As a side note, the <code>myRequestParam</code> values are populated from the DB and are returning newlines as <code>\r\n</code> which I have been escaping as <code>%0A</code>, but I am not sure if that's what I should be doing. The JavaScript originally wouldn't handle the <code>\r\n</code> (it would complain about unterminated strings, etc).</p>
 

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