Count textarea characters

Question

I am developing a character count for my textarea on this website. Right now, it says NaN because it seems to not find the length of how many characters are in the field, wh

Answer 1

$("#textarea").keyup(function(){
  $("#count").text($(this).val().length);
});

The above will do what you want. If you want to do a count down then change it to this:

$("#textarea").keyup(function(){
  $("#count").text("Characters left: " + (500 - $(this).val().length));
});

Alternatively, you can accomplish the same thing without jQuery using the following code. (Thanks @Niet)

document.getElementById('textarea').onkeyup = function () {
  document.getElementById('count').innerHTML = "Characters left: " + (500 - this.value.length);
};