IE - how to preserve white space in textarea, inputting with javascript string

FF and Chrome are behaving nicely, but IE 开发者_JS百科(8) is not keeping the white space in my formatted code I'm putting into a TEXTAREA

<textarea id="vdt_table_textarea" style="white-space: pre"></textarea>

and

var vdt_demo_table_string = '<table id="example" class="display">\n\
  <thead>\n\
    <tr>\n\
      <th>Rendering engine</th>\n\
      <th>Browser</th>\n\
      <th>Platform(s)</th>\n\
      <th>Engine version</th>\n\
      <th>CSS grade</th>\n\
    </tr>\n\
  </thead>\n\
  etc....
';

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('#vdt_table_textarea').html(vdt_demo_table_string.replace(' ', ' '));
});

how can I make IE respect my authoritah?!

CSS

textarea{
white-space:pre;
}

Or

textarea{
white-space:pre-wrap;
}

Not sure why your way doesn't work, but this does:

$('#vdt_table_textarea').html(vdt_demo_table_string.replace(/ /g, ' '));