Unable to retain line breaks when writing text file as blob

Question

I have a text area that contains text that I want to output to a text file for users to download.

I'm using this function to grab it when users click the save button

function saveTextAsFile()
{
    var textToWrite = document.getElementById("inputText").value;
    var textFileAsBlob = new Blob([textToWrite], {type:'text/plain'});
    alert(textFileAsBlob);
    var fileNameToSaveAs = document.getElementById("inputFileNameToSaveAs").value;

    var downloadLink = document.createElement("a");
    downloadLink.download = fileNameToSaveAs;
    downloadLink.innerHTML = "Download File";
    if (window.webkitURL != null)
    {
        // Chrome allows the link to be clicked
        // without actually adding it to the DOM.
        downloadLink.href = window.webkitURL.createObjectURL(textFileAsBlob);
    }
    else
    {
        // Firefox requires the link to be added to the DOM
        // before it can be clicked.
        downloadLink.href = window.URL.createObjectURL(textFileAsBlob);
        downloadLink.onclick = destroyClickedElement;
        downloadLink.style.display = "none";
        document.body.appendChild(downloadLink);
    }

    downloadLink.click();
}

But the line breaks aren't retained. They exist in document.getElementById("inputText").value; but not in the text file created from the blob.

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem. This seems to be working for me:

textToWrite = textToWrite.replace(/\n/g, "\r\n");

Answer 2

change

var textFileAsBlob = new Blob([textToWrite], {type:'text/plain'});

to

var textFileAsBlob = new Blob([textToWrite], {type:'text/plain',endings:'native'});

May not work in IE and I dont know how to fix it

Answer 3

You should put something like that into your code.

textToWrite.replace(/\r?\n/g, '<br />');