Copy Button Preserving Line Breaks

Question

I have some very basic Javascript that copies text upon the push of a button. My problem is that it doesnt preserve line breaks:

Answer 1

We have adapted the copyToClipboard function to get it to work with our application. The changes were the following:

• change the input to textarea so that the line breaks are passed;
• change the text() function to html() so that the HTML is passed;
• use a regex to replace each HTML br with the linefeed;
• use another regex to strip the remaining HTML. The HTML in our application should only have and
tags, so the simple regex should work, and also handle the odd tag that might be present.

Here is our adapted function, along with comments:

// Note: original replace used to strip HTML tags from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5002111/javascript-how-to-strip-html-tags-from-string ReactiveRaven.
// However, replaced closing (>|$) with > as I don't understand why the check for $ is there, as it implies that $ is part of an HTML tag.
// Our requirement highly constrains the HTML, to mainly have 
 and  tags, so the general objection to parsing HTML with regex
// as at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags community wiki is not applicable.
// BTW, that page is very entertaining!
function copyToClipboard(element)
{
    var $temp = $("");
    $("body").append($temp);
    var x = $(element).html().trim().replace(/<br>/g, '\n').replace(/<\/?[^>]+>/g, '');
    $temp.val(x).select();
    document.execCommand("copy");
    $temp.remove();
}
</code></pre>

<p>Btw, if somebody knows why the regex from the cited page had the (>|$) that we changed to >, we would appreciate gaining the understanding as to why the dollar sign that we removed is needed.</p>
    </p>
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