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IE - how to preserve white space in textarea, inputting with javascript string

FF and Chrome are behaving nicely, but IE (8) is not keeping the white space in my formatted code I'm putting into a TEXTAREA

<textarea id="vdt_table_textarea" style="white-space: pre"></textarea>

and 

var vdt_demo_table_string = '&lt;table id=&quot;example&quot; class=&quot;display&quot;&gt;\n\
  &lt;thead&gt;\n\
    &lt;tr&gt;\n\
      &lt;th&gt;Rendering engine&lt;/th&gt;\n\
      &lt;th&gt;Browser&lt;/th&gt;\n\
      &lt;th&gt;Platform(s)&lt;/th&gt;\n\
      &lt;th&gt;Engine version&lt;/th&gt;\n\
      &lt;th&gt;CSS grade&lt;/th&gt;\n\
    &lt;/tr&gt;\n\
  &lt;/thead&gt;\n\
  etc....
';

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('#vdt_table_textarea').html(vdt_demo_table_string.replace(' ', '&nbsp;'));
});

how can I make IE respect my authoritah?!

Solution

  • Not sure why your way doesn't work, but this does:

    $('#vdt_table_textarea').html(vdt_demo_table_string.replace(/ /g, '&nbsp;'));