Fix hn-comments-for-user removing newlines from comments

[Copilot]

HN comments with multiple paragraphs were being collapsed into a single line. The htmlToText function used textContent which strips all HTML structure including <p> and <br> tags.

Changes

• Preserve paragraph and line breaks: Convert </p> and <br> tags to \n before extracting text content
• Handle tag variations: Regex matches <br>, <br/>, <br />, and non-standard </br>
• Add test coverage: New test suite validates newline preservation across multiple HTML structures

// Before: collapsed all HTML structure
const htmlToText = (html) => {
  const div = document.createElement('div');
  div.innerHTML = html;
  return div.textContent.trim();
};

// After: preserve paragraph breaks
const htmlToText = (html) => {
  if (!html) return '';
  let text = html
    .replace(/<\/p>/gi, '\n')
    .replace(/<p>/gi, '')
    .replace(/<br\s*\/?>|<\/br>/gi, '\n');
  const div = document.createElement('div');
  div.innerHTML = text;
  return (div.textContent || div.innerText || '').trim();
};

Before/After

Top textarea shows original behavior (all paragraphs run together). Bottom shows fixed behavior (each paragraph on its own line).

Warning

Firewall rules blocked me from connecting to one or more addresses (expand for details)

I tried to connect to the following addresses, but was blocked by firewall rules:

• hn.algolia.com
  • Triggering command: `python3 -c
    import json
    import urllib.request

Fetch a sample comment from HN API

url = 'REDACTED,author_pg&hitsPerPage=1'
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response:
data = json.loads(response.read())
if data['hits']:
comment = data['hits'][0]
print('Sample comment HTML:')
print('='*60)
print(comment['comment_text'][:500])
print('='*60)` (dns block)

If you need me to access, download, or install something from one of these locations, you can either:

• Configure Actions setup steps to set up my environment, which run before the firewall is enabled
• Add the appropriate URLs or hosts to the custom allowlist in this repository's Copilot coding agent settings (admins only)

Original prompt

---

This section details on the original issue you should resolve

<issue_title>hn-comments-for-user removes all newlines from comments</issue_title>
<issue_description>It currently collapses newlines down to not even a space character.</issue_description>

Comments on the Issue (you are @copilot in this section)

• Fixes hn-comments-for-user removes all newlines from comments #99

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