Copy and Paste in to .htm textarea?

[Diana Watkins]

Question on textarea input within an HTML form - I have users who are attempting to copy and paste text from Word (and other places) into a textarea on an HTML form I created. As a result, this is giving varied results as (I assume) there are carriage returns, tabs, etc. included in what they are copying.  I have tried REPLACE and CTRAN to no avail.  Digging through old forums a bit, I saw where a couple of commenters stated to never EVER copy and paste text into textarea boxes from outside sources (except maybe Notepad). 

Is the general consensus that this simply won't work or has anyone been able to successfully get around it?

[David Beagan]

I had a customer who wanted to copy-and-paste a column of cells from Excel into a textarea on an HTML page that was created in HTML Canvas. This resulted in the desired data being pasted into the text area with crlf (carriage return / linefeed) characters between each value. When submitted to WebFOCUS, the crlf charaters were stripped out, making it potentially unknowable what the values were, once it gets into the WebFOCUS variable. 

My solution was to put some JavaScript on the page that would replace the crlf characters with something more useful such as commas or OR values (the JavaScript replace() method was very useful for this). If I remember correctly, I had an article published on this in one of the ibi publications. Too bad those aren't around anymore, and available for searching. 

I will check my archives and provide you with my solution later today.

Edited February 15 by David Beagan

[Diana Watkins]

Thank you, David! I appreciate your input!

[David Beagan]

Here's an example dug up from the archives. 

I have values in Excel and have run the page. I copy-and-past a list from Excel into the textarea:

then when I click Go, an onblur event triggers reformats the textarea and passes the value to WebFOCUS. I just have a simple fex that does a -TYPE of the variable that was passed.

 

Here is what I did in HTML Canvas. I created on onblur event on the textarea

The following shows the JavaScript code I put in the event. The id of the textarea is just the default name that HTML Canvas gave it. Yours may be different.

Here's the code for your copy-and-paste convenience: 

 document.getElementById('textarea1').value = document.getElementById('textarea1').value.replace(/\r\n/g,',');
 document.getElementById('textarea1').value = document.getElementById('textarea1').value.replace(/\r/g,',');
 document.getElementById('textarea1').value = document.getElementById('textarea1').value.replace(/\n/g,',');

The \n and \r represent carriage return and linefeed characters. The code is simplistic, for example, it puts a trailing comma at the end of the values. You could certainly do a lot more.

Edited February 19 by David Beagan

[Diana Watkins]

This worked, David! Thank you so much for your help!