Limiting Text In Textarea Form Field
By Will Bontrager2005-05-22
In certain situations (classified ad, page description, security), you may want to limit the amount of text that can be put into a textarea form field. For regular input tags, you can use the maxlength attribute, but the textarea tag has no such built-in limit specifier.
JavaScript can be used to limit the length.
First, put this somewhere on your page, in the <head></head> area or the <body></head> area, it doesn't really matter:
<script language="JavaScript"><!--
function Trim(s) {
var maxlength = 135; // Change number to your max length.
if (s.value.length > maxlength)
s.value = s.value.substring(0,maxlength);
} // -->
</script>
(Notice where you change the number to set your own maximum character length.)
Last, in the textarea tag, put this short JavaScript code:
onChange="Trim(this.form.message)"
(The "message" is the value in the name="______" of your textarea tag — if yours has a different name, change the above.)
Your textarea might look something like this:
<textarea name="message" wrap="soft" cols="22" rows="5"
onChange="Trim(this.form.message)"></textarea>
The JavaScript function does not prevent typing more characters than are allowed. But when the user clicks somewhere else, the excess characters are immediately trimmed from the textarea.
Tutorial pages:
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