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Javascript textarea cleanup from old textarea to new textarea

Hello EE,
I am receiving a paste of item numbers into a form textarea...probably strait from Excel, but who knows. When the user pastes or enters data into the old text area I want cleaned items to be written to a new textarea (for passing as a string.). This form will be on IE only. Here's the questions:
* Can this happen live or do I need to tie this to a submit button?
* The old textarea "paste" may contain spaces, special characters, line feeds, commas.
* The new textarea should have each cleaned item set to 10 digits (zero filled or left as is if they are bigger) and separated by a single comma (in case of multiple line feeds, spaces, etc.)

I've gotten this far, but broke something. For adding the zeroes I figured I could use a combination of length and concat, but I don't know how to repeat the zeroes.

Any direction would be appreciated!
LVBarnes

function getItems(id) {
var textArea = document.getElementById(id);
var words = textArea.value.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/g, ' ').split(/\s+/);
var words = textArea.value.replace(' ', ' ').split(/\s+/);
document.getElementById('new').value = words.join(',');
}

Kim Walker

For padding numbers, you can use a while loop:

while (str.length < 10) {
    str = '0' + str;
}

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Lawrence Barnes

ASKER

Thanks...can you help me get that into the function above?

Kim Walker

I'm not very good with regular expressions, but in your function you are declaring the variable words twice. The second declaration is overwriting the first. You should fix that, I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish there.

Once you have the words array set up properly, you can insert before your last line:

for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++) {
    word = words[i];
    while (word.length < 10) {
        word = '0' + word;
    }
    words[i] = word;
}

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Kim Walker

Also, you can attach this script to an onchange event on your input textarea element without having a button, but you would have to click outside the textarea or tab outside it for the script to execute.

Lawrence Barnes

ASKER

Here's my goal:
*****Input by user into textarea *****
12345,54321 23451
512#

45123
*****************************************
******Javascript writes cleaned up and zero filled string into a different textarea****
0000012345,0000054321,0000023451,00000512,0000045123
****************************************************************************

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Kim Walker

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Lawrence Barnes

ASKER

Thank you!