CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascripttextarea
jjxtra
jjxtra

Reputation: 21160

Get the exact contents of a textarea using javascript

I have a text area that looks like this:

<textarea id="txtBody" name="txtBody">q2312312312<strong>313213213</strong>21231321231231 &lt; &amp;lt;</textarea>

When I do this in javascript:

var t = document.getElementById('txtBody').value;

I get this back:

<p>q2312312312<strong>313213213</strong>21231321231231 < &lt;</p>

Seems like it should just give me the exact characters as they are... am I missing something? Is there a way to get the exact characters out of a text area?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 11075

Answers (2)

Quentin
Quentin

Reputation: 943999

am I missing something?

& is HTML for "Start an entity".

When you put the text into the HTML document (between the start and end tags for the textarea), you are failing to represent that text as HTML.

As a result, the browser performs error recovery and treats <strong> as "A less than character, the word strong, then a greater than character" (because tags are not allowed inside a textarea element, but treats &lt; as "A less than character" because there isn't a machine detectable error here.

Is there a way to get the exact characters out of a text area?

You need to write the HTML correctly in the first place.

<textarea id="txtBody" name="txtBody">q2312312312&lt;strong&gt;313213213&lt;/strong&gt;21231321231231 &amp;lt; &amp;amp;lt;</textarea>

Upvotes: 4

neurino
neurino

Reputation: 12415

I get the right contents, I guess your (X)HTML is not valid...

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
    <title>untitled</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
    <meta name="generator" content="Geany 0.19.1" />
</head>

<body>
    <textarea id="txtBody" name="txtBody">q2312312312<strong>313213213</strong>21231321231231& &lt; &amp;lt;</textarea>
    <script>
        var t = document.getElementById('txtBody').value;
        alert(t);
    </script>
</body>

</html>

Upvotes: 1

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