What is the best way to emulate an HTML input “maxlength” attribute on an HTML textarea?

Question

An HTML text input has an attribute called \"maxlength\", implemented by browsers, which if set blocks user input after a certain number of characters.

An HTML texta

Answer 1

PPK's Textarea Maxlength script is available on his site. Nothing fancy, just plain old JavaScript.

You can easily use this as a starting point and make changes to accommodate your CSS "notification" requirement.

Note that the author states: "The purpose of my script is not to enforce the maximum length, though it can easily be changed to do that. However, I decided to restrict my script to giving a polite reminder when the user exceeds the maximum amount of characters."

UPDATE: Due to linkrot on the attached article, here is the code that once existed on that link:

HTML:

JS:

function setMaxLength() {
    var x = document.getElementsByTagName('textarea');
    var counter = document.createElement('div');
    counter.className = 'counter';
    for (var i=0;i maxLength)
        this.relatedElement.className = 'toomuch';
    else
        this.relatedElement.className = '';
    this.relatedElement.firstChild.nodeValue = currentLength;
    // not innerHTML
}

Simply call the setMaxLength(); function on load.