Question

I have some javascript that I’m trying to retool using jQuery to learn the library better and I am running into what seems to be a very elementary problem.

html:

<form id='theForm'> What would you like to do?<br /><br /> <input type='text' id='doThis' /><br /><br /> </form> 

js:

$(document).ready(function() { $('#theForm').submit(function(){     var doThis = $('#doThis').value.toLowerCase();           alert(doThis); }); }); 

Can anybody offer some advice as to why this very simple interaction does not seem to work as it should?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You need to use val() to get the value in jQuery

$('#doThis').val().toLowerCase(); 

The DOM object is not readily accessible off of $(), it is stored in [0] by jQuery, so if you wanted to access the value the traditional way, you would do:

$('#doThis')[0].value.toLowerCase(); 

Additionally, I don’t think the form would submit right away in your case because of the alert(), but you should return false; to stop the submit if you don’t intend on it submitting.