enter does not work in textarea in Internet Explorer 8

html css internet-explorer textarea word-wrap

12,137

Solution 1

This article says Internet Explorer ignores line breaks with white-space: nowrap.

Their fix is to use white-space: pre. Does that get you your desired behavior?

Solution 2

So, the solution is, unfortunately, this -
For Internet Explorer 7, any white-space value other than pre will cause this issue.
For Internet Explorer 8, any white-space value other than pre-wrap will cause this issue.

I have not tried Internet Explorer 9, though.
In case this is happening there as well, just create a blank page with (a doctype and) a <textarea>, open it and press F12. In the console ("Scripts" tab), type console.log(document.getElementsByTagName("TEXTAREA")[0].currentStyle.whiteSpace) and simply use the value that is displayed within the output as the value of the white-space property of the <textarea>.

Update

I tried Internet Explorer 11. In emulation modes since Internet Explorer 7 mode, it behaves like Chrome in quirks mode (meaning, only white-space: normal and white-space: nowrap cause this issue). I guess they (unintentionally?) backported some fix to most of the emulation modes.

Solution 3

Does it have to be CSS solution? If not, you could assign attribute wrap="off" for textarea.

12,137

Author by

Aftershock

Updated on June 04, 2022

Comments

Aftershock almost 2 years
When I press enter in a textarea which has whitespace attribute is set to nowrap through css, it is ineffective. No new line is created. Instread a simple whitespace appears. This is only true in IE8. I Have tried current version of Opera,Chrome and Firefox and I have not encountered such problems. Do you have some solution for this?

Thanks..

I have this:
```
.gwt-TextArea
{
white-space:nowrap;
}
```
where gwt-TextArea sets the textarea.

Also, I have tried
```
.gwt-TextArea
    {
    white-space:pre;
    }
```
It seems to give the same result.
Aftershock almost 15 years

pre-line is not ok, it does not keep spaces and tabs. I tried pre, it does not work. Normal is the wrapped mode, that did not help either. I looked at quirksmode.org. It claims IE8 is fully compatible with respect to pre and nowrap. It does not seem to me so. At least for textareas.
jwatts1980 almost 13 years

I was having inconsistent behavior between IE9 and Chrome 13. Setting the attribute wrap="off" worked the same in both browsers.
wangkaibule about 8 years

This issue still exists in Internet Explorer 11, even if you set white-space value to normal explicitly.
PhistucK about 8 years

@wangkaibule - Chrome ignores new lines if you set it to normal or nowrap. I guess this is by design. Internet Explorer 11 fixed the rest, though. I updated my answer with data regarding Internet Explorer 11.