How to add line breaks to an HTML textarea?

If you use general JavaScript and you need to assign a string to a text area value, then document.getElementById("textareaid").value='texthere\\ntexttext'.

You need to replace \n or < br > with \\\n.

Otherwise, it gives Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL in all browsers.

The problem comes from the fact that line breaks (\n\r?) are not the same as HTML <br/> tags:

var text = document.forms[0].txt.value;
text = text.replace(/\r?\n/g, '<br />');

Since many of the comments and my own experience have shown me that this <br> solution is not working as expected, here is an example of how to append a new line to a textarea using '\r\n':

function log(text) {
    var txtArea;

    txtArea = document.getElementById("txtDebug");
    txtArea.value += text + '\r\n';
}