Question

I want to show an alert when a certain function is run and an if statement in that function finds that the <textarea> has no text in it. I tried:

<textarea rows="10" style="display: block;"id="textLoc" placeholder="Text to test"cols="50"></textarea>  

text = document.getElementById('textLoc').value;

    if (text == "") {
    //show alert
    }

but it did not work. Any ideas?

Update: I tried printing the value of the <textarea> in an alert and it showed the value as undefined. I then tried typeof text == "undefined" and it did not work either.

Answer 1

If the <textarea> element actually exists, value will be "" (empty string) if there is no text in it. From your comment on the other answer, “cannot read property of null” means document.getElementById('textLoc') is returning null: make sure that the ID of the element is correct.