Home/ Questions/Q 6165293
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T22:08:23+00:00

I’m implementing a length counter on textareas for a website (twitter style). I’m using

  • 0

I’m implementing a length counter on textareas for a website (twitter style). I’m using the code found here http://www.codefromjames.com/wordpress/?p=15 but seems not to work in IE7.
I’ve traced the issue to the check of the attribute “maxlength” in an element. It expects it to be null if the attribute is not found, but IE7 returns a number (which I guess is the maximum length allowed by the browser or by the HTML standard, I don’t know).
Here’s an example you can try:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="es" lang="es">
  <head>
  </head>
  <body>
    <input id="test"></input>
  </body>
    <script type="text/javascript">
var element = document.getElementById("test");
alert(element.getAttribute("maxlength"));
</script>
</html>

Try executing this on IE7 and you’ll find out it gives a number instead of null.

Exact version of IE7 is 7.0.5703.13

Should I consider this a IE7 bug or is it working as expected?

Cheers!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can check element.attributes.maxLength.specified to find out whether maxLength is indeed user-specified.

    var element = document.getElementById('test');
var maxLength, defaultLength = 100;

if (element.attributes.maxLength && element.attributes.maxLength.specified) {
 maxLength = element.attributes.maxLength.nodeValue || defaultLength;
} else {
 maxLength = defaultLength;
}
    • 0