How to Check if Text Field has Value in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if text field has value in javascript. In HTML, a text field is created using either input element or textarea element. Input element is suitable for a single line text content and textarea element is suitable for multiline text content. From a developer perspective, it can be a bit tricky to find if a text field has value.
There are numerous ways to check if a text field has a value. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use value
property of the input element. It will return the string present in the input element.
In the following example, we have one text field where we will enter some random text. Upon click of a button, we will check if the text field has a value and display the result on the screen. Please have a look over the code example and the steps given below.
HTML & CSS
- We have 4 elements in the HTML file (
div
,input
,button
, andh1
). Thediv
element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements. - The
innerText
for thebutton
element is“Check”
and for theh1
element, it is“Result”
. - We have done some basic styling using CSS and added the link to our
style.css
stylesheet inside thehead
element. - We have also included our javascript file
script.js
with ascript
tag at the bottom.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css"> <title>Document</title> </head> <body> <div class="container"> <input type="text" /> <button>Check</button> <h1>Result</h1> </div> <script src="script.js"></script> </body> </html>
.container { text-align: center; } button { margin-top: 10px; padding: 10px 20px; } input { display: block; padding: 5px 10px; margin: auto; }
Javascript
- We have selected the
button
element,input
element, andh1
element using thedocument.querySelector()
method and stored them inbtnCheck
,inputEl
, andoutput
variables respectively. - We have attached a
click
event listener to thebutton
element. - In the event handler function, we are getting value from the text field and storing it in the
value
variable. - We are using ternary operator (
?
) to check if thevalue
is empty or not. If it returns true, that meansvalue
variable does contain some valid string and not empty. With conditional operators, an empty string always returns false. - Depending upon the result of the check, we will assign
“Yes”
or“No”
to theresult
variable. - We are displaying the
result
in theh1
element using theinnerText
property.
let btnCheck = document.querySelector("button"); let inputEl = document.querySelector("input"); let output = document.querySelector("h1"); btnCheck.addEventListener("click", () => { let value = inputEl.value; let result = value ? "Yes" : "No"; output.innerText = result; });