I found that if I save data directly from a text area field to a lookup table, all new lines are removed. I found that new lines can be found using the regex /\r\n|\r|\n/ and that \n is accepted when re-populating a text area field.

However, Single Lines will not store a \n text. So you can not simply move the data to a single line field with the \n text for storage in the lookup table.

What I had to do instead was replace all new lines with a special string of characters, then find and convert these back to \n before updating the text area after lookup. It works but I feel I am missing something to make this more streamlined.

Is there a simpler method to save text area data with the new lines and retrieve it from lookup tables?