Question

I have a basic textarea:

<textarea id='text_comment'></div>

I have this function:

$('#text_comment').live('keypress', function() {

    setTimeout(function() {
    string = $(this).val();         

         alert(string);
    }, 500);

});

It should alert the value that is in the textarea, but it alerts nothing.

I would like it to get the value of the textarea after 500ms, but it doesn’t seem to set the variable if it is inside of the setTimeout function.

Answer 1

context becomes window‘s since setTimeout is a method of window.

$('#text_comment').live('keypress', function() {

    var el = this;

    setTimeout(function() {
         var string = $(el).val();         

         alert(string);
    }, 500);

});

if you save a reference to the el in this manner you can rely on it instead of this

And also, you can just use el.value since theres no need to wrap it in jQuery and do the exact same thing internally by .val()