JavaScript Forum

**The_Anomaly** · 06-14-2005, 12:34 PM

trying to make a text form. when someone fills out a box and click the text box (onBlur) if there was an '&' symbols it will replace it with 'and'. something i'm doing here is way wrong, i dun like javascript

Code:

<?xml version ="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
	<head>
		<title>& - and</title>

<script type="text/javascript">   
	function replaceString(value)
		{
			var text1 = document.getElementById("text1"); 
			text1 = text1.replace("&","and");
		}
</script> 
	</head>



<body>
<form method=''post'' /> 
<input name="text1" type="text" id="text1" value="inputtext" onBlur="return replaceString(this);"> 
<input name="text2" type="text" id="text2" value="input more text"> 
<input name="Submit" type="submit" value="K"> </form>


</body>
</html>

**Christopher** · 06-14-2005, 02:48 PM

Code:

var text1 = document.getElementById("text1");

This will only get you a reference to the element on the page. It doesn't get you the 'value' property. To get/alter the value, you have to access it (like text1.value).

Therefore, the next line should be rewritten as:

Code:

text1.value = text1.value.replace("&","and");

This will work, but it will not replace all instances of the & (only one at a time). To fix this, change the search string into a regular expression where you can use the 'global' flag:

Code:

text1.value = text1.value.replace(/&/g,"and");

That line in place of yours should make it work as expected.

**The_Anomaly** · 06-14-2005, 03:08 PM

tried replacing that and it still doenst seem to work. am i doing something wrong with the onBlur ?

**Christopher** · 06-14-2005, 04:00 PM

It's working for me in Firefox and IE

Make sure you're not using a cached version of the page.

And I didn't see you were using onblur with this. You don't need to use getElementById since this will already contain a reference to the element:

Code:

this.value = this.value.replace(/&/g,"and");

Note that the second text box won't replace the characters because you haven't attached any functionality to it.