jQuery textarea append newline behavior

Question

I\'m trying to append a strings which end in newlines to a textarea using jQuery. However, different newline tokens show different behavior in Firefox3.5 and IE8, and I can\

Answer 1

Not sure how you are setting the textarea content, but if you use the jQuery val method, \n works consistently in Firefox and IE (Including IE8):

var txt = $("textarea#idhere");
txt.val( txt.val() + "\nSomething here\n\nAgain");

Causes the textarea to display:

Existing content
and linebreaks if any.
Something here

Again

You can see a demo here that works in FF and IE8: Demo | Source

Answer 2

Does pressing the [enter] key cause a new line in IE8 for you? You may have to do what the answer to this question suggests: enter does not work in textarea in Internet Explorer 8