Question

Here is a plug-in that binds a click event on an element, which generates a container with a <textarea> and then i bind a keypress event on this new <textarea>, all is ok, but inside the keypress handler i can only get the state of text().length from when the initial click happened.

How do i get the onKeyPress function to get the state of the <textarea> at the time the keypress happened?

$.fn.pluginTemp = function(options){
    var defaults = {
            editContainer:"<div class='editContainer'><textarea></textarea></div>",
            maxChar:20,
            onKeyPress:function(){
                    console.log($(".editContainer>textarea").text())
               }

     }
    var options = $.extend(defaults,options); 
    return this.each(function(i,e){
        var el = $(e), initText
        el.bind("click", function(){
            initText = el.text();
            el.parent().append(options.editContainer);
            el.parent().find(".editContainer>textarea").html(initText);
              // isn't this function remembering the state for when its is defined?  which is on keypress?          
               return function(){
                el.parent().find(".editContainer>textarea").bind("keypress",options.onKeyPress)
            }()

        })
    })
}

Answer 1

I got the problem,

Instead of getting the current value via the .html() method,
I used .val()

Here is why:
The .html() method when used on a <textarea> looks only at the initial state of the textarea, When you have .val() it samples the most current value.