document.getElementById().value doesn't set the value

Question

Browser is chromium (under ubuntu)

This is a chunk of code: (of course) The alert messages shows the right value. but the points element doesn't get the right value, it actually gets empty. Can anybody tell me why?

Here's how points element is defined.

<input type='number' id='points' value='0'/> 

and here is how javascript code is supposed to populate it.

alert(request.responseText);

document.getElementById("points").value=request.responseText;

Answer 1

Your response is almost certainly a string. You need to make sure it gets converted to a number:

document.getElementById("points").value= new Number(request.responseText);

You might take a closer look at your responseText. It sound like you are getting a string that contains quotes. If you are getting JSON data via AJAX, you might have more consistent results running it through JSON.parse().

document.getElementById("points").value= new Number(JSON.parse(request.responseText));