Question

How do I load a .txt files contents into a textarea form field using onClick?

Asked by: tim013

How do I load a .txt files contents into a textarea form field using onClick?

I'm close but I just can't figure this out or find an answer anywhere.

When <button1> is clicked, I want the contents in textfile.txt to be displayed in <textarea>.

This is what I got:

<input type="button" onClick="document.getElementById('textarea').value=href=('textfile.txt')" name="button1" id="button1" value="Button 1" />

<input type="textarea" name="textarea" id="textarea" value="" />

What this code does, is displays "textfile.txt" in the textarea rather than the contents in my textfile.txt file. The textfile.txt file is in the same path as this webpage.

So basically, I want the contents in textfile.txt to be displayed in a textarea form field when button1 is clicked. I do believe this may be possible with the right .valueblahblahblah in the second part of the onClick function. Or maybe there is a more simple way of doing it using ajax or php.

What I'm trying to do is have a row of buttons at the top and a textarea below that on my webpage. When one of those buttons is clicked, the contents of the specified .txt file is displayed in that textarea form field.

I'm doing this on a .html page.

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Asked On
2009-10-09 at 02:52:40ID24798717
Tags

onClick

,

textarea

,

javascript

,

load text

,

html form field

Topics

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

,

JScript

,

Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX)

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
13

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Answers

 

by: Graceful_PenguinPosted on 2009-10-09 at 03:04:49ID: 25533516

You must use ajax to get the data then load the response into the textarea.

 

by: tim013Posted on 2009-10-09 at 03:10:54ID: 25533535

Thanks for the quick response Graceful Penguin, however, my knowledge on ajax is very limited at the moment. I'm very familiar with html. But as far as ajax, javascript and everything is concerned, I only know what I use which isn't much more than the very basics.

I did upload everything to my webserver. Everything I have can be shown in action at www.gtfokthx.com
The html page of this is index.html.
The text file I want displayed in textarea is located at www.gtfokthx.com/textfile.txt

I hope this helps. I kept everything very simple and short so by looking at the source code you can see where i'm going.

 

by: christophermccannPosted on 2009-10-09 at 03:18:28ID: 25533576

The only proper way to do this is using AJAX really. HTML really nothing more than a language for representing web pages. It is not really a programming language. So to get file contents you would need to use AJAX.

AJAX simply creates an request to your server - contact a PHP file which then communicates back with your AJAX script with the contents of the file (textfile.txt). The AJAX script then just prints this to the textarea.

Would you like some code to assist you?

 

by: tim013Posted on 2009-10-09 at 03:20:44ID: 25533583

Yes christophermccann, some code assistance would be so much appreciated!

 

by: Graceful_PenguinPosted on 2009-10-09 at 03:38:07ID: 25533668

Check this out for the basics of ajax if you want to learn : http://www.w3schools.com/Ajax/default.asp

But the code below should work

function GetXmlHttpObject()
{
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {
  // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
  return new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
if (window.ActiveXObject)
  {
  // code for IE6, IE5
  return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
return null;
}
 
function stateChanged()
{
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4)
  {
  document.getElementById('textarea').value = xmlhttp.responseText;
  }
}
 
var xmlhttp
 
var url="textfile.txt";
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=stateChanged;
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
                                              
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by: tim013Posted on 2009-10-09 at 05:14:42ID: 25534150

I can't seem to figure out what to put in the onClick statement in order to get textfile.txt to output into the textarea from that code you posted.

Would it be something like:

<input type="button" onClick="document.getElementById('textarea').value=xmlhttp.responseText" name="button1" id="button1" value="Button 1" />  ?

Now sure how to get that in there.

 

by: Graceful_PenguinPosted on 2009-10-09 at 05:21:04ID: 25534192

Sorry I was not very clear the part that is not in a function should be in the onclick. 

function GetXmlHttpObject()
{
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {
  // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
  return new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
if (window.ActiveXObject)
  {
  // code for IE6, IE5
  return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
return null;
}
 
function stateChanged()
{
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4)
  {
  document.getElementById('textarea').value = xmlhttp.responseText;
  }
}
 
function GetFile();
{
  var xmlhttp
  var url="textfile.txt";
  xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=stateChanged;
  xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
  xmlhttp.send(null);
}
 
<input type="button" onClick="GetFile();" name="button1" id="button1" value="Button 1" />
                                              
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by: tim013Posted on 2009-10-09 at 05:55:00ID: 25534458

Okay I put that in the index.html file but nothing happens when I click Button 1.
Can you take a look at www.gtfokthx.com and check the source code? I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

 

by: Graceful_PenguinPosted on 2009-10-09 at 07:04:27ID: 25535069

I don't know how it happend but this:

var xmlhttp

should be this:

var xmlhttp = GetXmlHttpObject();

I fixed it below.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
function GetXmlHttpObject()
{
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {
  // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
  return new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
if (window.ActiveXObject)
  {
  // code for IE6, IE5
  return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
return null;
}
 
function stateChanged()
{
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4)
  {
  document.getElementById('textarea').value = xmlhttp.responseText;
  }
}
 
function GetFile()
{
  var xmlhttp = GetXmlHttpObject();
  var url="textfile.txt";
  xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=stateChanged;
  xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
  xmlhttp.send(null);
}
 
</script>
 
<input type="button" onClick="GetFile();" name="button1" id="button1" value="Button 1" />
<br /><br />
<input type="textarea" name="textarea" id="textarea" value="" />
 
</body>
</html>
                                              
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by: tim013Posted on 2009-10-09 at 17:55:31ID: 25540100

Hmm, not sure what's still wrong but Button 1 still doesn't do anything.

 

by: xxli79Posted on 2009-10-11 at 22:20:55ID: 25548731

remove the function stateChanged and modify the "GetFile" function:

function GetFile()
{
  var xmlhttp = GetXmlHttpObject();
  var url="http://www.gtfokthx.com/textfile.txt";
  xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
	if (xmlhttp.readyState==4)
	  {
	  document.getElementById('textarea').value = xmlhttp.responseText;
	  }
  }
  xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
  xmlhttp.send(null);
}

                                              
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by: xxli79Posted on 2009-10-11 at 22:22:06ID: 25548736

line 4 in my code,  you can change it to: var url = "textfile.txt"

 

by: tim013Posted on 2009-10-12 at 01:59:44ID: 31639181

I am very happy with the posted results. Thank you very much Graceful Penguin for all of your responses and also thank you xxli79 for clearing up the GetFile code.

I am glad to say this question has been answered to my satisfaction and is now solved.

Very much appreciated.

Thanks.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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