Counting and limiting words in a textarea

Question

I managed to make this little jquery function to count the number of words entered in textarea field.

here is the fiddle

and here is the code:

JQUERY

Answer 1

You can use positive lookahead regexes to preserve the whitespace - so that returncodes and tabs are not collapsed to a single space. Something like this:

  var wordLimit = 5;
  var words = 0;
  var jqContainer = $(".my-container");
  var jqElt = $(".my-textarea");

function charLimit()
{
  var words = 0;
  var wordmatch = jqElt.val().match(/[^\s]+\s+/g);
  words = wordmatch?wordmatch.length:0;

  if (words > wordLimit) {
      var trimmed = jqElt.val().split(/(?=[^\s]\s+)/, wordLimit).join("");
      var lastChar = jqElt.val()[trimmed.length];
      jqElt.val(trimmed + lastChar);
  }
  $('.word-count', jqContainer).text(words);
  $('.words-left', jqContainer).text(Math.max(wordLimit-words, 0));
 }
 
 jqElt.on("keyup", charLimit);
 charLimit();

  
   words left