preserving line feeds in text extracted from HTML

I have an html table that is being rendered on a web page that I using in a jquery lookup to plug values into textarea.

The table that is rendered on has <td>s with data like this

<td class="ms-vb"><p>Hello.&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;line2</p>

and

<div>1</div><div>2</div><div>3</div>

which appears like this on the page.

Hello

line 2

and

1
2
3

I'm using some jquery to pull that data of the hmtl table and insert it into a textarea textbox.. but when I do I'm just see a long string of text without the html tags and certainly no line feeds.

What's a good jquery or javascript way to insert that data into 开发者_运维百科my textearea field that at least linefeeds are preserved in the textarea?

So basically I need a function that would turn this string

Any way in jquery or javascript for form that html data so that at least line feeds are preserved in my multiline textarea?

=== full code here.. basically doing a lookup of some table on my page and using it to plug in values in a two textxboxs:

<script type="text/javascript"> 
$('select[title$=Issue Type] option:eq(0)').text("Please Select").val(""); 
$('select[title$=Issue Type]').change(function(){
var issue = $('select[title$=Issue Type] :selected').text();
var bodyprefixes = [];
$('#issuetbl td:contains('+issue+')').nextAll().each(function(i, k) {
bodyprefixes.push($(k).text());
});
$('input[title$=Subject]').val(bodyprefixes[1]);
$('input[title$=Message]').val(bodyprefixes[0]);
});
</script>

Try using regex. If you want to to support other tags, you will have to include them in the regex. The one here supports
also:

$('#txtarea').text(
    $('td.ms-vb').text()
        .replace(/<\/?(br|div|p)\/?>/g, "\n\n")
        .replace(/<[^>]+>/g, "")
);

note: you may need to trim quadruple '\n' from your output.

Something like:

var textAreaInput = '';

var getTextFromElement = function() {
  textAreaInput += $(this).text() + '\n';
};

$('p').each(getTextFromElement);
$('div').each(getTextFromElement);