Question

I am having a table td which contains a textarea and a button and I want to send the value of textarea on button click via AJAX however there is a problem selecting the closest textarea to the button.

JavaScript

$(document).ready(function () {
    $(document).on("click", ".addR", function () {
        paperID = $(this).attr("paperID");
        commentID = $(this).attr("commentID");
        text = $(this).closest("textarea").val();
        $.ajax({
            data: {
                paperID: paperID,
                commentID: commentID,
                text: text
            },
            type: 'POST',
            url: 'add_rebuttal.php',
            success: function (response) {
                alert(response);
                window.location.href = window.location.href;
            }
        });
    });
});

PHP:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($comments)) {
    echo "<tr><td>{$row['text']}</td>";
?>
    <td><br /><textarea class="reText" rows='5' name='reText' id='reText' style='width:98%;' type='text'></textarea>
    <button commentID="<?php echo $row['comment_id'] ?>" paperID="<?php echo $paper_id ?>" class="addR" type="button" name="addR" id="addR">send rebuttal</button></td></tr> <?
}

The problem is $(this).closest("textarea").val(); return undefined, so how I can solve this problem?

Answer 1

closest() returns the closest ancestor. Your textarea is not an ancestor of your button, it’s a previous sibling. Instead, try:

text = $("textarea", $(this).parent()).val();