Question

My buddy at work told me that you could use jQuery to write a few lines of code that would find a single character (in this example '\0') and replace it for all textboxes and textareas on the page. Of course, he didn’t tell what lines of code would do that …

Is there a simple way to do this? We have a problem of people copying data from an old system and the data having a '\0' at the end of the text. This then gets saved in the database, and then when brought back from the database to the client, it causes an error.

EDIT: I agree with Magnar’s answer, but just for learning sake, does anyone know of a way to do this?

Answer 1

This isn’t a job for jQuery. I would strongly recommend you remove the null-character on the server side, for added stability and security reasons.

However, this is how you would do it (slightly verbose):

var remove_null_character = function () {
    var field = $(this),
        old_value = field.val(),
        new_value = old_value.replace('\0', '');
    field.val(new_value);
};
$("input:text, textarea").live("blur", remove_null_character);