In IE when I insert text into a <pre> tag the newlines are ignored:
<pre id="putItHere"></pre>
<script>
function putText() {
document.getElementById("putItHere").innerHTML = "first line\nsecond line";
}
</script>
Using \r\n instead of a plain \n does not work.
<br/> does work but inserts an extra blank line in FF, which is not acceptable for my purposes.
These quirksmode.org bug report and comments about innerHTML behaviour of Internet Explorer could help:
"IE applies HTML normalization to the data that is assigned to the innerHTML property. This causes incorrect display of whitespace in elements that ought to preserve formatting, such as <pre> and <textarea>."
Here is a very small tweak to Edward Wilde's answer that preserves the attributes on the <pre> tag.
if (elem.tagName == "PRE" && "outerHTML" in elem) {
var outer = elem.outerHTML;
elem.outerHTML = outer.substring(0, outer.indexOf('>') + 1) + str + "</PRE>";
}
else {
elem.innerHTML = str;
}