Count textarea characters

Question

I am developing a character count for my textarea on this website. Right now, it says NaN because it seems to not find the length of how many characters are in the field, which at the beginning is 0, so the number should be 500. In the console in chrome developer tools, no error occur. All of my code is on the site, I even tried to use jQuery an regular JavaScript for the character count for the textarea field, but nothing seems to work.

Please tell me what I am doing wrong in both the jQuery and the JavaScript code I have in my contact.js file.

$(document).ready(function() {
    var tel1 = document.forms["form"].elements.tel1;
    var tel2 = document.forms["form"].elements.tel2;
    var textarea = document.forms["form"].elements.textarea;
    var clock = document.getElementById("clock");
    var count = document.getElementById("count");

    tel1.addEventListener("keyup", function (e){
        checkTel(tel1.value, tel2);
    });

    tel2.addEventListener("keyup", function (e){
        checkTel(tel2.value, tel3);
    });

    /*$("#textarea").keyup(function(){
        var length = textarea.length;
        console.log(length);
        var charactersLeft = 500 - length;
        console.log(charactersLeft);
        count.innerHTML = "Characters left: " + charactersLeft;
        console.log("Characters left: " + charactersLeft);
    });​*/

    textarea.addEventListener("keypress", textareaLengthCheck(textarea), false);
});

function checkTel(input, nextField) {
    if (input.length == 3) {
        nextField.focus();
    } else if (input.length > 0) {
        clock.style.display = "block";
    } 
}

function textareaLengthCheck(textarea) {
    var length = textarea.length;
    var charactersLeft = 500 - length;
    count.innerHTML = "Characters left: " + charactersLeft;
}

Answer 1

I found that the accepted answer didn't exactly work with textareas for reasons noted in Chrome counts characters wrong in textarea with maxlength attribute because of newline and carriage return characters, which is important if you need to know how much space would be taken up when storing the information in a database. Also, the use of keyup is depreciated because of drag-and-drop and pasting text from the clipboard, which is why I used the input and propertychange events. The following takes newline characters into account and accurately calculates the length of a textarea.

$(function() {
  $("#myTextArea").on("input propertychange", function(event) {
    var curlen = $(this).val().replace(/\r(?!\n)|\n(?!\r)/g, "\r\n").length;

    $("#counter").html(curlen);
  });
});

$("#counter").text($("#myTextArea").val().replace(/\r(?!\n)|\n(?!\r)/g, "\r\n").length);

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<textarea id="myTextArea"></textarea><br>
Size: <span id="counter" />

Answer 2

Here is simple code. Hope it is working

$(document).ready(function() {
var text_max = 99;
$('#textarea_feedback').html(text_max + ' characters remaining');

$('#textarea').keyup(function() {
    var text_length = $('#textarea').val().length;
    var text_remaining = text_max - text_length;

    $('#textarea_feedback').html(text_remaining + ' characters remaining');
});

});

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<textarea id="textarea" rows="8" cols="30" maxlength="99" ></textarea>
<div id="textarea_feedback"></div>

Answer 3

They say IE has issues with the input event but other than that, the solution is rather straightforward.

ta = document.querySelector("textarea");
count = document.querySelector("label");

ta.addEventListener("input", function (e) {
  count.innerHTML = this.value.length;
});

<textarea id="my-textarea" rows="4" cols="50" maxlength="10">
</textarea>
<label for="my-textarea"></label>

Answer 4

textarea.addEventListener("keypress", textareaLengthCheck(textarea), false);

You are calling textareaLengthCheck and then assigning its return value to the event listener. This is why it doesn't update or do anything after loading. Try this:

textarea.addEventListener("keypress",textareaLengthCheck,false);

Aside from that:

var length = textarea.length;

textarea is the actual textarea, not the value. Try this instead:

var length = textarea.value.length;

Combined with the previous suggestion, your function should be:

function textareaLengthCheck() {
    var length = this.value.length;
    // rest of code
};