How to linebreak an svg text within javascript?

Question

So here is what I have:

<path class="..." onmousemove="show_tooltip(event,'very long text 
    \\\n I would like to linebreak')" onmouseout="hide_tooltip()" d="..."/>

<rect class="tooltip_bg" id="tooltip_bg" ... />
<text class="tooltip" id="tooltip" ...>Tooltip</text>

<script>
<![CDATA[
function show_tooltip(e,text) {
    var tt = document.getElementById('tooltip');
    var bg = document.getElementById('tooltip_bg');

    // set position ...

    tt.textContent=text;

    bg.setAttribute('width',tt.getBBox().width+10);
    bg.setAttribute('height',tt.getBBox().height+6);

    // set visibility ...
}
...

Now my very long tooltip text doesn't have a linebreak, even though if I use alert(); it shows me that the text actually DOES have two lines. (It contains a "\" though, how do I remove that one by the way?)
I can't get CDATA to work anywhere.

Answer 1

This is not something that SVG 1.1 supports. SVG 1.2 does have the textArea element, with automatic word wrapping, but it's not implemented in all browsers. SVG 2 does not plan on implementing textArea, but it does have auto-wrapped text.

However, given that you already know where your linebreaks should occur, you can break your text into multiple <tspan>s, each with x="0" and dy="1.4em" to simulate actual lines of text. For example:

<g transform="translate(123 456)"><!-- replace with your target upper left corner coordinates -->
  <text x="0" y="0">
    <tspan x="0" dy="1.2em">very long text</tspan>
    <tspan x="0" dy="1.2em">I would like to linebreak</tspan>
  </text>
</g>

Of course, since you want to do that from JavaScript, you'll have to manually create and insert each element into the DOM.