Question

I’m looking for how to get input from a webpage into a JavaScript variable?

[EDIT]

Sorry I wasn’t clear. I needed to get a user to input some text that I could capture into a variable. I then need to split this variable up, do a search, like Google on each element, then display the results on the screen.

As I understand it I can use jQuery’s get method to look up the information, then get each response out and put it on the screen. Thanks for the pointers to jQuery I can now proceed further

Answer 1

There are several ways. One would be to have an input field of type text, then attach an event listener to the input field which responds to the enter key?

<input type="text" id="commandLine"/>

then in js

$("#commandLine").bind('keydown' function(e) {
    if (e.which == 32) {
        var command = $("#commandLine").val();
        //Do stuff with the command
    }
});

Or if you want to interrupt flow until you get a response, you could use prompt eg.

var command = prompt("What is your command?","");
alert(command );

As pointed out my code above requires jQuery – this is a library which makes using javascript much easier when coding for multiple browsers. It’s worth taking a look at it at http://jquery.com it’s very easy to make use of by simply adding in a script tag pointing at the jQuery library eg.

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.0/jquery.min.js" />