I've got a JSP page with a piece of Javascript validation code which limits to a certain amount of characters on submit. I'm using a <textarea> so I can't simply use a length attribute like in a <input type="text">.

I use document.getElementById("text").value.length to get the string length. I'm running Firefox 3.0 on Windows (but I've tested this behavior with IE 6 also). The form gets submitted to a J2EE servlet. In my Java servlet the string length of the parameter is larger than 2000!

I've noticed that this can easily be reproduced by adding carriage returns in the <textarea>. I've used Firebug to assert the length of the <textare> and it really is 2000 characters long. On the Java side though, the carriage returns get converted to UNIX style (\r\n, instead of \n), thus the string length differs!

Am I missing something obvious here or what ? If not, how would you reliably (cross-platform / browser) make sure that the <textarea> is limited.