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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T20:26:47+00:00

I have a text area that is required to be filled in before continuing

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I have a text area that is required to be filled in before continuing on with a particular process.

For normal text boxes I can retrieve all the blank inputs by adding the attribute selector [value=”] the the selection string.

When I do that with text area it does not work.

If I am in IE and not in strict mode it does work, but that I not something that I want to do.

If I first select all text areas and then perform a filter call with [value=”] as the selector it does work.

Is this by design? It makes sense from the standpoint that a text area does not really have a value attribute, but I would guess that the filter call would not work.

Here is an example code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
    <SCRIPT SRC="jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></SCRIPT>

    <SCRIPT>
        $(function () {
            var Rslt1 = $("textarea[value='']").size(); 
            var Rslt2 = $("textarea").filter("[value='']").size();
            alert(Rslt1 + ' ' + Rslt2);
        })
    </SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
    <TEXTAREA></TEXTAREA>
</BODY>
</HTML>

In IE 8, Chrome 4 and Firefox 3.6 the result is 0 1 as described above.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Textarea doesn’t have a ‘value’ attribute. Try $("textarea:empty").

    Updated to show how it works with jQuery (OP’s question), vanilla JS, and CSS.

    document.querySelector('textarea:empty').style.width = "300px"

$("textarea:empty").css("background", "blue")
    textarea:empty {
  border: 3px solid red;
}
    <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<textarea id="empty"></textarea>
<textarea id="notempty">foo</textarea>
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