Textarea misses first line if empty (in display)

[sebastian.hillig]

If you save a textarea with a leading empty line, the browser won't show you that line (when viewing that textarea a change form again). This is due to a behaviour that browsers (test FF, Safari on Mac and IE 7 on Win) ignore the first line-break within a textarea when displaying it. Therefore the patch only adds one line-break right after the opening textarea-tag

[sebastian.hillig]

Patch, only adds a line-break, with corrected tests

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

I'm not sure I like this. It changes the data without the user's consent. If you load a form, then save, then load again, then save again (e.g. whilst editing), blank lines keep getting added to your data.

[James Bennett]

I really don't like this, because it silently corrupts the data in ways that will' screw with things people commonly use textareas for.

(as I was saying before Malcolm closed this out from under me)

[Thomas Kerpe]

Replying to mtredinnick:

I'm not sure I like this. It changes the data without the user's consent. If you load a form, then save, then load again, then save again (e.g. whilst editing), blank lines keep getting added to your data.

In the wild the opposite happens (At least in Safari, Firefox, IE7, Opera, lynx and others). If you rely on lets say one or two newlines in front of other data in a textarea the first newline will get eaten on every save. I have not found a current browser yet that handles this different. Opera has even changed this behavior to ignore the first line: ​http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=94823

Use for example FlatPage in admin enter some newlines in the textarea and then some other visible characters. Now hit "Save and continue editing" several times and watch the characters wandering upwards. In reverse entering something different to a newline will work fine. With that patch no additional newline is stored in the database.

The Spec is not 100% clear here but all major Browsers implement it on the same way.
​http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.7

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

We can look at this after 1.0. It's too late now to have time to test it thoroughly and it's a bit of an edge case (only affects leading blank lines). I'm worried that it will change things for, e.g., machine-processed data that uses HTML intelligently.

[Thomas Kerpe]

For documentation:
Maybe this will help with that issue when someone is working or thinking on it later: ​http://www.toke.de/textarea-nl-testcase.html

[(none)]

Milestone post-1.0 deleted

[Aymeric Augustin]

This seems just wrong, but I could confirm the bug. Given that all browsers behave consistently, we'd better add the CRLF.

The patch is stale.

[Claude Paroz <claude@…>]

In 78f66691ee7974e0ca546f09573394395a68b443:

Fixed #8627 -- Prevented textareas to swallow first newline content

Browsers consider the first newline in textareas as some display
artifact, not real content. Hence they are not sending it back to
the server. If we want to keep initial newlines, we have to add one
when we render the textarea.
Thanks bastih for the report and initial patch.