Question

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How to preformat inside textarea

rated 0 times [ 1] [ 4] / answers: 1 / hits: 19233 / 12 Years ago, mon, march 19, 2012, 12:00:00

I was wondering if it were possible to preformat text that is inside a textarea. Right now I have a textarea code that I want to add syntax highlighting and also add linenumbers so I am trying to wrap the text inside a pre tag. Is this correct or should I be doing something completely different?

<textarea id=conversation class=codebox style=font-family:courier;>

<pre class=brush: js;>//  Start typing...</pre>

</textarea>

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chauncey

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3 Years ago

answered 12 Years ago devlin · Accepted Answer

textareas are not able to render content like you're wanting to do, they only display text. I would suggest an in-browser code editor. A good one is CodeMirror, which is fairly easy to use:

HTML

<textarea id=code name=code>

// Demo code (the actual new parser character stream implementation)



function StringStream(string) {

  this.pos = 0;

  this.string = string;

}

...

</textarea>

Javascript

var editor = CodeMirror.fromTextArea(document.getElementById(code), {

    lineNumbers: true,

    matchBrackets: true

});

And CodeMirror insert an editable block with that content within the new editor.

There are other options. Wikipedia has a comparison of Javascript-based source code editors entry.