Validating a Textarea

[Eridius]

how do i validate a textarea field. This is my current code to validate a text field but it does not work for textarea:

this.validate_element = function(type, validate_element)
    {
        var element = document.getElementsByName(validate_element)[0];
       
        switch(type)
        {
            case "text":
                if(validate_element)
                {
                    if(element.value)
                    {
                        return true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        return false;
                    }
                }
                break;
           
            default:
                break;
        }
       
        return false;
    }

can anyone tell my why this will not work on textarea? my guess that that i don't access the data with .value but how do i access the data?

[Fang]

textarea does not have a type attribute so that would not work.
use the default in the switch to check for

if(element.nodeName=='TEXTAREA') {
//validate textarea
}

[Eridius]

The type variable is not something i am getting from the DOM but something the programmer(me) has to put in. I would do something like this in the code:

form_helper.validate_element("textarea", this);

to validate the current element on a keyup or some other event. I just want to know how would i access the data inside the textarea. I am basically going to add a case for each type i need to check so i would add a case for textarea, select, radio, etc... The reason i am doing it like this instead of automatically getting what type is if the field is a email field, they can do:

form_helper.validate_element("email", this);

and i will have a case "email" and in there there will be a regex or something to make sure the entered text is a valid email format.

[Fang]

If this is pointing to the textarea then this.value would be the data.
The function you gave would, of course, not work.