Question

I’m trying to start a project that requires that the javascript know every word that’s typed in. An example of something I would try to accomplish would be that you would type 4 + 4, the interpreter on the webpage knows what you mean, and automatically puts = 8 on to the end of that line to show it’s computed it, without having to submit anything or press any button.

I’ve looked into the element, but I don’t want to reinvent the wheel or go against what the spec says. With putting a <textarea> as input on top of a canvas, the javascript on the page can only know what is in the textbox when the user submits the text. Is there anything out there that would help with this?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

To get the value of a textarea you can just access it via the DOM:

var textArea = document.getElementById("id-of-textarea");

To the textarea you can attach different eventlisteners, and in your case I would use onkeypress

textArea.onkeypress = function () {
   var ta_value = textArea.value;
   alert(ta_value);
}

Of course you’d have to write your own interpreter, I wouldn’t recommend running eval on the input…