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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T18:53:51+00:00

I’m working through a tutorial right now on form validation, and I would like

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I’m working through a tutorial right now on form validation, and I would like assistance on why this function always returns the if condition. 

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
     <form id="form" action="#" method="post">
        <fieldset>
            <p>
                First Name:
                <input type="text" id="txt" />
            </p>
            <p> <input type="submit" value="submit" onclick="validate()" /> </p>
        </fieldset>
    </form>
    <script type="text/javascript"> 
        function validate() 
            {
            var userName = document.getElementById("txt").value;
            if (userName.length == 0)
                {
                alert("FINISH THAT UP");
                return false;
                } 
            else 
                {
                alert("thanks, " + UserName);
                }
            }
    </script>
</body>

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It does reach the else part when the textbox is not empty, but then it crash with error thus the form is being silently submitted.

    JavaScript is case sensitive – UserName is different than userName thus undefined.

    Change to:

    alert("thanks, " + userName);

    To avoid such problems, you can wrap the whole block with try..catch like this:

    function validate() 
{
    try
    {
        var userName = document.getElementById("txt").value;
        if (userName.length == 0)
        {
            alert("FINISH THAT UP");
            return false;
        } 
        else 
        {
            alert("thanks, " + UserName);
        }
    } catch (err) {
        alert("general error while validating: " + err.message);
        return false;
    }
}

    With this in place, you would see “UserName is undefined”.

    Live test case.

    Also, on a side note – with your current code, even with empty value the form will still be submitted although you return false – that’s because you need to cancel the submit even:

    <input type="submit" value="submit" onclick="return validate()" />

    You forgot the return keyword in the onclick itself.

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