How can I insert new line/carriage returns into an element.textContent?

Question

As silly as it may sound, I still haven\'t found an appropriate answer.

Let\'s say I want to dynamically create a new DOM element and fill up its textContent/innerTe

Answer 1

You can concatenate the strings...

h1.innerHTML += "...I would like to insert a carriage return here...<br />";
h1.innerHTML += "Ant the other line here... <br />";
h1.innerHTML += "And so on...<br />";

jsFiddle.

Answer 2

I found that inserting \\n works. I.e., you escape the escaped new line character

Answer 3

I know this question posted long time ago.

I had similar problem few days ago, passing value from web service in json format and place it in table cell contentText.

Because value is passed in format, for example, "text row1\r\ntext row2" and so on.

For new line in textContent You have to use \r\n and, finally, I had to use css white-space: pre-line; (Text will wrap when necessary, and on line breaks) and everything goes fine.

Or, You can use only white-space: pre; and then text will wrap only on line breaks (in this case \r\n).

So, there is example how to solve it with wrapping text only on line breaks :

var h1 = document.createElement("h1");

//setting this css style solving problem with new line in textContent
h1.setAttribute('style', 'white-space: pre;');

//add \r\n in text everywhere You want for line-break (new line)
h1.textContent = "This is a very long string and I would like to insert a carriage return \r\n...";
h1.textContent += "moreover, I would like to insert another carriage return \r\n...";
h1.textContent += "so this text will display in a new line";

document.body.appendChild(h1);