Question

I am working with a javascript function and I just got a liitle problem. I want the function to replace the “enters” to “#” so I use:coment = coment.replace(/\\n/gi,"*#*"); and it works perfect when the coment do have any “enter” but when the comment does not have any “enter”, or the comment is blank, It stops working and sends an error which says:

‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘replace’

How can I control that if it has any “enter” it replaces, if not, does not do anything

the “coment” comes from this:

<textarea id="coment"></textarea>

Thank You!

Answer 1

The problem depends upon what is actual in coment. If coment has a DOM element in it, then you need to get the value from the input field so it has a string:

coment.value = coment.value.replace(/\n/g,"*#*");

If, the issue is that coment is sometimes null or undefined, I would suggest checking first to see if coment has a valid string in it:

if (coment) {
    coment = coment.replace(/\n/g,"*#*");
}

For the null or undefined case, you could also just precondition coment like this:

coment = coment || "";
coment = coment.replace(/\n/g,"*#*");

You may note that I changed a couple things in the replace function too. If you’re just trying to replace the newline character, you don’t need the double backslash inside a regex definition and there’s no reason for the “i” flag on the regex since you don’t have any letters in the pattern.

To know specifically which of these applies, you would need to show us the code that gets the value into coment so we can see what it actually has in it or you need to examine coment in the debugger or console.log to see what it has in it.