Question

Is it possible to get the initial value of a form input field?

For example:

<form action="" id="formId">
    <input type="text" name="one" value="one" id="one" />
</form>

$("#one").attr("value");   //would output "one"
$("#one").val();           //would output "one"
$("#one").get(0).value;    //would output "one"

However, if the user then changed the content of the #one input field to two, the html would still look the same (with one as the value) but the JQuery calls above would return two.

JSFiddle to play with: http://jsfiddle.net/WRKHk/

I think that this must still be possible to get the orginal value, since we are able to call document.forms["formId"].reset() to reset the form to its original state.

Answer 1

The DOM element has the attribute “value” which you can access by:

element.getAttribute('value');

… which may be different from the element’s property value.

Demo

Note that you may call .setAttribute('value', 'new value') which will actually affect any form.reset() that is called after.