Selenium version: 2.12.1
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
Browser: Firefox
Brower version: 8.0

I'm trying to get the contents of a textarea in an HTML form using webdriver in Python.

I'm getting the text, but all of the newlines are missing.

I'm currently using the following code:

  from selenium import webdriver

  # open the browser and web site
  b = webdriver.Firefox()
  b.get('http://www.example.com')

  # get the textarea element
  textbox = b.find_element_by_name('textbox')

  # print the contents of the textarea
  print(repr(textbox.text))

This prints the representation of a Python unicode string of the textarea's contents
as expected, except all the newlines have been replaced by spaces. Doh!

To test the code on your own, you'll need to replace the URL with one that goes to
a page with text content (try a Wikipedia article's edit page) and 'textbox' with the
name of the text element.

I ran exactly the same code with Chrome instead of Firefox and it works fine.