Javascript document.getElementById("id").value returning null instead of empty string when the element is an empty text box

Question

I have a text box element whose value I am trying to access using document.getElementById("id-name").value. I find that the call is returning a null instead of empty string. The data-type of the returned value is still string. Is null a string value?

<input type="text" value="" id="mytext"> is the textbox whose value I am trying to fetch using var mytextvalue = document.getElementById("mytext").value;

Answer 1

Posting your HTML might help a bit. Instead, you can get the element first and then check if it is null or not and then ask for its value rather than just asking for the value directly without knowing if the element is visible on the HTML or not.

element1 = document.getElementById(id);

if(element1 != null)
{
    //code to set the value variable.
}

Answer 2

fyi, this can happen if you are using the html type="number" attribute on your input tag. Entering a non-number will clear it before your script knows what's going on.

Answer 3

For your code

var mytextvalue = document.getElementById("mytext");

mytextvalue will contain null if you have a document.write() statement before this code. So remove the document.write statement and you should get a proper text object in the variable mytextvalue.

This is caused by document.write changing the document.

Answer 4

Please check this fiddle and let me know if you get an alert of null value. I have copied your code there and added a couple of alerts. Just like others, I also dont see a null being returned, I get an empty string. Which browser are you using?