Question

How, or is it even possible, to get the this value from a function? I’ve made this snippet which saves defaultValue on the function, but I would like to read this from outside the function, directly on the dom element. Is that possible??

I’ve made this, in jQuery:

$("input").val(function() {
    var $label = $("label[for='" + $(this).attr("id") + "']");
    this.defaultValue = $label.text();
    $label.hide()
    return this.defaultValue
}).click(function() {
    if ($(this).val() == this.defaultValue) {
        $(this).val("");
    }
}).bind("blur", function() {
    if ($(this).val() == "") {
        $(this).val(this.defaultValue);
    }
});

See it in action here: http://jsfiddle.net/ZUZ3L/g6dMA/

Answer 1

You can save it to the element represented in the DOM with jQuery’s .data() function:

Do this on pageLoad:

$(this).data('defaultValue', $(this).val());

You can retrieve it later with:

alert($('#myElement').data('defaultValue');

…which will return the value set at pageload, rather than the current value of the input.