I'm struggling with form serialization in jQuery 1.4.2, in a Rails 2.3.8 project.

I'm ajax-posting a form containing a textarea, grabbing the form contents using $(form).serializeArray(). 

$.ajax uses $.param to serialize the contents, which in turn uses encodeURIComponent. If my textarea contains:
foo

"bar"

baz 

then the resulting request body contains

  text=foo "bar" baz 

 which Rack/Rails manages to deserialize as simply "text"=>"bar".  *

 The spec - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4.1 - reckons that: 

Line breaks are represented as "CR LF" pair s (i.e., ` ').

Shouldn't jquery be normalizing the output of encodeURIComponent to convert plain linefeeds to CRLFs?

-Jonathan

*: Oddly, if the 2nd line doesn't have quotes around it, the params parser is able to get the entire contents of the 'text' value.