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Answer 1

+1 A:

getElementsByTagName returns a live node list. If your element has an ID, use getElementById. If you want to do this on multiple elements in the node list, use a for loop.

var a = document.getElementById('enquiry');

meder 2010-07-28 17:30:09

In your current code, assuming you only have (or want to access) one textarea, you could use `a[0].value` instead of `a.value`

Ryan Kinal 2010-07-28 17:33:18

Answer 2

+1 A:

getElementsByName() returns an array of all the elements with the specified name. If your text-area is the first element on the page with the name "enquiry", you can add [0] to select it from the array. Second of all you should never EVER use single-character variable names. They are much harder to understand and work with. This is a more readable version of your code that should work:

var enquiryTextArea = document.getElementsByName('enquiry')[0]; 
a.value="blah blah blah";

enquiryTextArea tells you exactly what the variable means. Its the enquiry text-field itself. Not an array. If you care about code size, you can use a javascript minifier.

Better still, you can use getElementById() as the name attribute is deprecate on non-form related tags and is better when selecting one specific element:

var enquiryTextArea = document.getElementById('enquiry'); 
a.value="blah blah blah";

This is going to sound really typical, but firebug for firefox can be a HUGE help when diagnosing problems like these, as can jquery when doing absolutely anything with javascript. :D

CrazyJugglerDrummer 2010-07-28 17:33:26

Answer 3

A:

Use:

var a = document.getElementsByName('enquiry')[0];

And it should work. But I agree with meder's comment. If you have more than one textarea with the same name and you want to change all of them, you should put this in a for loop, like this:

var a = document.getElementsByName('enquiry'); 
for( var i=0; i<a.length; i++)
     a[i].value = "Some Text";

Fabiano 2010-07-28 17:36:04

Answer 4

A:

var a = document.getElementsByName('enquiry');

is empty until after the page loads.

in your tag, put an onLoad event, and make your code a function that onLoad calls.

echo "<script> 
function foo() {
    var a = document.getElementsByName('enquiry'); 
    a.value='Pedido de Informação de Preço, relativamente ao producto: http://www.musicland.pt/musicstore/product_info.php?products_id=2581';
}
</script>";

And then in the body tag :

<body onLoad="foo();">

jason 2010-07-28 17:48:18

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