Textarea onchange detection

Question

Hi,

How do I detect change event on textarea using javascript?
I'm trying to detect how many characters left is available as you type.

I tried using the onchange event, but that seems to only kick in when focus is out.

Thanks,
Tee

Answer 1

Have you looked into onkeyup?

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onkeyup.asp

Answer 2

Make it easy on yourself and use a jQuery plugin like jquery.maxlength. Tutorial at http://www.anon-design.se/demo/maxlength-with-jquery.

Answer 3

You will need to use onkeyup and onchange for this. The onchange will prevent context-menu pasting, and the onkeyup will fire for every keystroke.

See my answer on How to impose maxlength on textArea for a code sample.

Answer 4

The best thing that you can do is to set a function to be called on a given amount of time and this function to check the contents of your textarea.

self.setInterval('checkTextAreaValue()', 50);