HTML textarea default value line breaks

This one I struggled to find the right formula to get it working. The solution was so simple and basic that I wonder why I did not just try it before all the complicated approaches.

I basically needed to have line breaks occurring in the default value of a textarea field inside a HTML form. That is between the <textarea>…</textarea> tags.

My first approach was to simply add \n where I wanted a line break. I also tried all possible combinations of \r, \n, CR, LF, separate, together, quoted, escaped… you name it. Nothing worked.

Googling around proved no good. Most people kept referring to the nl2br function in PHP, but this is not what I was trying to achieve. Besides this is all client code, pure HTML, no server side processing involved.

I ended up at the W3 HTML specification and saw the light! A simple example copied from their site included the solution to all my struggles:

<FORM action="http://somesite.com/prog/text-read" method="post">
   <P>
   <TEXTAREA name="thetext" rows="20" cols="80">
   First line of initial text.
   Second line of initial text.
   </TEXTAREA>
   <INPUT type="submit" value="Send"><INPUT type="reset">
   </P>
</FORM>

Notice how they simply added a line break in the actual HTML source. This is so simple that you may even not notice the subtle difference. Let me show you how I had my initial code:

<form>
<p>Some random paragraph</p>
<textarea>First line \n Second line</textarea>
<p>Some more randomness</p>
</form>

As normally white space in HTML is simply ignored I did not give a thought about the fact that a line break can be created in the default textarea value by simply…, yes, adding a line break when writing the source code.