textarea has no value?

Question

I am sure my javascript works, because it works with other form elements.

But I cant get it to work with the textarea...

Textarea.value doesnt seem to work... I read someplace textareas dont have values, so how would you solve this.

Im trying to validate a form and checking if value is empty doesnt work.

Thanks

UPDATE:

some code:

                function descriptionValid(fld){
  if (fld.value=="") {
  document.getElementById("annonsera_descriptionempty_error").style.display='block';
  document.getElementById("annonsera_description").focus();
  document.getElementById("annonsera_descriptionshort_error").style.display='none'; 
  return false;
 }
 else if (fld.value.length<3){
  document.getElementById("annonsera_descriptionshort_error").style.display='block';
  document.getElementById("annonsera_description").focus();
  document.getElementById("annonsera_descriptionempty_error").style.display='none'; 
  return false;
 }
  document.getElementById("annonsera_descriptionempty_error").style.display='none'; 
  document.getElementById("annonsera_descriptionshort_error").style.display='none'; 
 return true;
            }

somehow, it doesnt go through the if statements and instead returns true;

Answer 1

document.getElementById ( "yourtextareaid" ).value;

should return you the value inside the textarea.

Answer 2

So long as Textarea is a reference to the element, then it should work.

The element doesn't have a value attribute, but it does have a value property.

Whatever it wrong, it isn't in the code you've shown us.

Answer 3

Textareas have values. To troubleshoot the issue, test first if the textarea element you try to access exists, like this:

alert(document.getElementById("textAreaId")!=null?'exists':'does not exist');

Answer 4

your empty textarea will not return an empty string. try this as your first test;

if (fld && (fld.value === null || fld.value === "")) {

or my simpler favorite is

if (fld && (''+ fld.value === "")) {

Answer 5

Thru DOM you can get the value in a Textarea (See here for more info)

Good luck!

Answer 6

Just a silly thing incase you've missed it. Textarea treats whitespace as content so if you have your textarea tags like this:

<textarea>

</textarea>

Then the newlines between the tags will be returned as the value. Meaning value == "" will be false. Best to trim the content before you do your test or mean sure your textarea tags have no whitespace in them:

<textarea></textarea>

Answer 7

One of the first things I would do is stick in some

alert("This part of the if statement fired");

in a few places to find out which bit is actually happening, because I had a similar issue with firefox and discovered that it was actually down to how I set the form to deal with onsubmit events:

<form method="post" action="url" onsubmit="javascript:return checkForm();">

the important bit is the return, without that, Firefox doesn't seem to care about the return value from the function.

Answer 8

A collegue of mine had a similar problem a while ago. In some browsers the value is never empty. Even if the textarea contains no text, the value contains a line break ending the empty line of text.

You could trim any extra line breaks at the end of the text, and then check if it's empty:

var txt = fld.value.replace(/\\n+$/,'');
if (txt.length == 0) ...