Question

I just started learning JS the other day and am (of course) having some difficulty. I usually grasp onto things quickly but I can’t for the life of my find a solution to this. I’d like to understand why this is happening.

My objective is to use 3 prompt boxes, all which come one after another, to print out a piece of html code, which will be a simple URL. I’ll add more to this but I’d like to get past this first.

At the moment, I’m getting the prompts, but after I enter data into the third box and submit it, nothing happens.

What am I doing wrong here? If it’s an error with my document.write code, what are some things I should be looking out for?

Thanks!..

function show_prompt()
{
    var site_type = prompt("What kind of link is this?");
    var site_url = prompt("What is the URL?");
    var site_title = prompt("Give the link a title");
    if (site_type = website) {
        document.write("<a style=\"color: #777777\" href=\"http:\/\/site_url\" title=\"site_title\">site_title<\/a>");
    }
    else 
        if (site_type = video) {
            document.write("<a style=\"color:#98B2C3\" href=\"http:\/\/site_url\" title=\"site_title\">site_title<\/a>");
        }
        else 
            if (site_type = image) {
                document.write("<a style=\"color:#8D5359\" href=\"http:\/\/site_url\" title=\"site_title\">site_title<\/a>");
            }
            else 
                (site_type = article); {
                 document.write("<a style=\"color:#768D53\" href=\"http:\/\/site_url\" title=\"site_title\">site_title<\/a>");
                }
}

Answer 1

Well, before we even start trying to work through how the if statements are going to work, we need to fix the fact that you are assigning not comparing in your if() statements.

Rather than have a single = sign in your if statements you need to have 2 equal signs. Like this:

if (site_type == website)

A single = sign is used to assign variables, so in your case you’re actually assigning the value of website into the variable of site_type – not comparing the two seperate values.

Try this:

function show_prompt()
{
        var site_type = prompt("What kind of link is this?");
        var site_url = prompt("What is the URL?");
        var site_title = prompt("Give the link a title");
        if (site_type == "website") {
            document.write("<a style=\"color: #777777\" href=\"http:\/\/"+site_url+"\" title=\"site_title\">"+site_title+"<\/a>");
        }
        if (site_type == "video") {
            document.write("<a style=\"color:#98B2C3\" href=\"http:\/\/"+site_url+"\" title=\"site_title\">"+site_title+"<\/a>");
        }
        if (site_type == "image") {
            document.write("<a style=\"color:#8D5359\" href=\"http:\/\/"+site_url+"\" title=\"site_title\">"+site_title+"<\/a>");
        }
        if(site_type == "article") {
            document.write("<a style=\"color:#768D53\" href=\"http:\/\/"+site_url+"\" title=\"site_title\">"+site_title+"<\/a>");
        }
}

I’ve made a few changes to your code in the above chunk, not just removing the else statements. I’ve also made the if() comparisons check against strings rather than against empty variables as you had before and I’ve changed the document.write functions to use the added prompt strings in them.
If we can get that to work, we can start thinking about where we really want to put the else statements at a later date 🙂