jQuery detect if textarea is empty

Question

I am trying to determine if a textarea is empty if a user deletes what is already pre-populated in the textarea using jQuery.

Anyway to do this?

This is what

Answer 1

To find out if the textarea is empty we have a look at the textarea text content and if there is one sinlge character to be found it is not empty.

Try:

if ($(#textareaid).get(0).textContent.length == 0){
  // action
}
//or
if (document.getElmentById(textareaid).textContent.length == 0){
  // action
}

$(#textareaid) gets us the textarea jQuery object. $(#textareaid).get(0) gets us the dom node. We could also use document.getElmentById(textareaid) without the use of jQuery. .textContent gets us the textContent of that dom element. With .length we can see if there are any characters present. So the textarea is empty in case that there are no characters inside.