Newline not preserved when reading from Textarea

My java webapp fetches content from a textarea, and e-mails the same.

The problem I'm facing is that the newline character in the textarea message is not preserved when reading the same using

request.getParameter("message");

Any clues how it can be tackled?

TIA.

EDIT:

The content in the textarea is:

abcd

abcd

CODE:

String message = request.getParameter("message");

        System.out.println("index loc for message "+message+" using \\r\\n : "+message.indexOf("\r\n"));
        System.out.println("index loc for message "+message+" using \\n : "+message.indexOf("\n"));
        System.out.println("index 开发者_StackOverflow社区loc for message "+message+" using \\r : "+message.indexOf("\r"));
        System.out.println("index loc for message "+message+" using \\n\\r : "+message.indexOf("\n\r"));

OUTPUT:

index loc for message asdfasdf using \r\n : -1

index loc for message asdfasdf using \n : -1

index loc for message asdfasdf using \r : -1

index loc for message asdfasdf using \n\r : -1

That completely depends on how you're redisplaying it.

It sounds like that you're redisplaying it in HTML. "Raw" newlines are not part of HTML markup. Do a rightclick, View Page Source in webbrowser. You'll see linebreaks over all place. Usually before and/or after HTML tags.

In order to visually present linebreaks in the HTML presentation, you should actually be using <br> tags. You can replace newlines by <br> strings as below:

message = message.replace("\n", "<br>");

This is only sensitive to XSS attack holes if the message is an user-controlled variable, because you have to present it unescaped in JSP (i.e. without <c:out>) in order to get <br> to work. You thus need to make sure that the message variable is sanitized beforehand.

Alternatively, you can also set CSS white-space property there where you're redisplaying the message to pre. If you'd like to wrap lines inside the context of a block element, then set pre-wrap. Or if you'd like to collapse spaces and tabs as well, then set pre-line.

<div id="message"><c:out value="${message}" /></div>

#message {
    white-space: pre-line;
}

This will display the text preformatted (as a textarea by default does).

Two possible problems:

• The text in the textarea is word wrapped and doesn't really have any newlines.

• The String you get with getParameter() contains newlines (\n) but no carriage returns (\r) as expected by many email programs.

As a first step, I'd try dumping the retrieved String in a way you can check for this. You could write to a file and use od or a hex editor to look at the file, for example.

If it turns out you're simply missing CRs, you could do some simple regexp-based replacement on the string to fix that.

Searching the ASCII codes i found that the new line is not defined like the often \n, instead is defined like \r\n.

Regards.

You need to encodeURIComponent() before submitting the form and decodeURIComponent() on the server side.