Maintaining line breaks when "Essay" type is saved | XM Community
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Hi all,



First time post as I'm a bit stumped.



The issue:

Qualtrics seems to not maintain formatting upon submission of multine/essay type questions.



I thought I could tackle this with some jQuery but I'm having no luck still.



My solution attempt:

- Essay type question

- on the question is the following JS/jQuery:



Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnload(function()

{

/*Place your JavaScript here to run when the page loads*/

console.log("loaded question "+this.questionId);

jQuery("#"+this.questionId+" textarea").on("blur", function() {

jQuery(this).val().replace("\\n","<br>");

});





});



Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnReady(function()

{

/*Place your JavaScript here to run when the page is fully displayed*/





});



Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnUnload(function()

{



});



Coding steps:



1. Targetting the textarea

2. When it unfocuses

3. Change the value contained within



I seem to be stuck on step 3 - the blur works fine. It's difficult to tell whether I've succeeded or not (recommendations here appreciated too - if there's a good function to present unencoded text so I can visibly spot <br\\> vs \\n ?)



This whole scenario seems silly as "multi-line" fields are still "actually-really-one-line" fields.



Any help much appreciated - completely new to the API, and rusty with my jQuery.
First, providing a string argument to .replace() only replaces the first instance. You need to use regex to do a global replace. Also, you never updated the value. Try this instead:

```

this.value = this.value.replace(/\\n\\r?/g, "<br>");

```

If you want to do it so the respondent doesn't see it, use the addOnPageSubmit function instead of a blur event.



I don't remember ever testing it, but if the Qualtrics server strips html tags from inputs (for security) you'll loose the breaks anyway.
Damn,



Well I mean thank you for the information - that makes sense - but it looks like the later might hold true as far as stripping HTML :(



Would be nice if Qualtrics only stripped out more potentially abusive elements like <iframe\\>s. Seems a bit overkill to strip out <br\\>s

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