Question

How can I append a list of text into a textarea?

<textarea id="alltext"></textarea>

<ol>
    <li onclick="addText(Hello')">Hello</li>
    <li onclick="addText(World')">World</li>
    <li onclick="addText(Earthlings')">Earthlings</li>
</ol>

<script>
    var Alltext = "";
    function addText(text) {
        Alltext += text
    }
document.getElementById("alltext").value = Alltext;
</script>

This is quite inefficient as the list is actually very long. The text added is exactly the value I see on the HTML so there’s no need to type it twice right?

Is there any better methods?

Answer 1

Use event delegation by assigning the onclick to the <ol>. Then pass the event object as the argument, and using that, grab the text from the clicked element.

function addText(event) {
    var targ = event.target || event.srcElement;
    document.getElementById("alltext").value += targ.textContent || targ.innerText;
}

<textarea id="alltext"></textarea>

<ol onclick="addText(event)">
  <li>Hello</li>
  <li>World</li>
  <li>Earthlings</li>
</ol>

Note that this method of passing the event object works in older IE as well as W3 compliant systems.