Question

I’m trying to take user form input and display it back to the user, among other things (all of which require the input being stored as a JS variable).

I’m trying to spit it out in an alert, as a quick feedback loop, and all I keep getting is [object HTMLInputElement]. I’ve tried to use document.forms[0] and document.getElementById (like below) and neither work. Also, I’m using bootstrap typeahead, could that be complicating this issue?

What am I missing?

Here’s the code:

<div class="hero-unit">
    <h1> Title </h1>
    <p> This form description </p>  
    <form class="well" name="formInput" action= "#">
        <label>Input</label>
        <input Id="txtvarInput" class="span3" style="margin: 0pt auto;" type="text" placeholder="AAA, BBB, CCC..." data-provide="typeahead" data-items="10" data-source="[&quot;AAA&quot;,&quot;BBB&quot;,&quot;CCC&quot;,&quot;DDD&quot;,&quot;EEE&quot;,&quot;FFF&quot;,&quot;GGG&quot;,&quot;HHH&quot;,&quot;III&quot;,&quot;JJJ&quot;,&quot;KKK&quot;,&quot;LLL&quot;]"/>               
        </label>
        <div class="form-actions" "span3">
            <input name="submit" type="submit" class="btn" value="Select" onclick="alert('you chose ' + theInput.value)"/>
            <script language="JavaScript" type="Text/JavaScript">
                var theInput = document.getElementById('txtvarInput');
            </script>
        </div>
    </form>
</div>

<div class="page-header">
    <h1>Input:
        <script language="JavaScript" type="Text/JavaScript">
            document.write(theInput.value);
        </script>
    </h1>

Edit: PART II, now the code works for the alert, but I need to use it elsewhere (like I said) and the variable isn’t available in other sections of the html. Above, I’m just trying to get it to display that same value as a part of the html. It could be my JS, but this is pretty boilerplate stuff, so I think it’s related to the location of the variable.

What do I need to do use it elsewhere? I’ve added the next div above to show what I’m trying.

–left an extra declaration of the variable in part II by accident, was one of the tests I was trying, removed now.

Answer 1

Right now, the object you’re alerting is an HTML element, not a string. You can get its value using the value property:

alert('you chose ' + theInput.value)

---

(Note that you probably didn’t mean:

var theInput = document.getElementById('txtvarInput').value;

As other answers suggest, because that would give you an empty string. It’s only read once.)