Question

I found on some examples on the web that people were passing the form to a function and then they were only using the id of the item to access it like in :

<form id="frm">
<input type="text" id="textbox" name="textbox" value="some value" />
</form>

<script>
console.log(getelementval("#frm"));

function getelementval(frm) {
return frm.textbox.val();
}
</script>

But FireBug tells me that frm.textbox is undefined… Then I’m searching why it doesn’t work on the net but I didn’t find anything explaining this option and how to use it.
Any clues?

Answer 1

You will have to modify the JS slightly to make this work:

function getelementval(frm) {
    return $(frm)[0].textbox.value;
}

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/gdZEK/2/

• $(frm) returns an element matching the selector.
• [0] fetches the actual DOM element.
• .textbox works on DOM elements only, not jQuery objects. It matches [name='textbox'].
• .value needs to be used instead of .val(), as .textbox isn’t a jQuery object.

Honestly, I don’t really see how this is better than just using jQuery:

$('#frm input[name="textbox"]').val();