extract text from html without loosing new lines

Question

I use the following code to extract text from html.

var html = "first line.&nbsp;<div>second line.&nbsp;</div><div>third line.</div><div><br></div>"
var text = extractContent(html);
console.log("TEXT: " + text);

function extractContent(s) {
   var span = document.createElement('span');
   span.innerHTML = s;
   return span.textContent || span.innerText;
} 

the result of this code is the text without new lines. but I want the result to replace divs with "\\n" like this:

first line."\n"second line. "\n" third line."\n"

Answer 1

Use s.replaceAll('&nbsp', '\\\\n'); to replace the linefeed.
Note: The backslash \\ needs to be escaped with another \\ .

 var html = "first line.&nbsp;<div>second line.&nbsp;</div><div>third line.</div><div><br></div>" var text = extractContent(html); console.log("TEXT: " + text); function extractContent(s) { var span = document.createElement('span'); s = s.replaceAll('&nbsp', '\\\\n'); span.innerHTML = s; return span.textContent || span.innerText; }

Answer 2

document.createElement is not necessary, you can use regexp alone to achieve this:

 var html = "first line.&nbsp;<div>second line.&nbsp;</div><div>third line.</div><div><br></div>" var text = extractContent(html); console.log("TEXT: " + text); function extractContent(s) { /* * /(<[^>]+>)+/gim <---- this regexp to match all html tags and replace them with \\n, * also merge empty content html tags into one \\n * */ return s.replace(/(<[^>]+>)+/gim, "\\n"); }