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JavaScript DOM Scripting By Example Improving the Application Code Refactor 1: Create List Items

Posted by Siddharth Pandey
Siddharth Pandey
7,280 Points

Why is text an input.value and not input.textContent

Shouldn't the text be an input.textContent because we are looking at the text, why is it a value instead?

1 Answer

rydavim
rydavim
18,814 Points
rydavim
rydavim
18,814 Points

Okay, so textContent and value are different things.

All nodes have a textContent property representing it's content and that of it's descendants. This will return null or an empty string for some types of elements, including input. input elements have a value property representing the element's initial data or the data provided by the user.

Try using a console.log on different types of elements to experiment with these differences. If you have any follow up questions, just let me know. Happy coding!

Siddharth Pandey
Siddharth Pandey
7,280 Points

I tried something like this in the console, and I got undefined when I asked the console to show the value, but it worked when I asked the console to show the text content. This is what I got from the console:

Console was cleared
undefined
const test = document.createElement('p');
undefined
test.textContent = "hi";
"hi"
console.log(test.textContent);
head_vendor-6a3288bb3aef100cad5d3497f90343103ec0f44b56f4ab0a057922302e7e77bb.js:1404 hi
undefined
console.log(test.value);
head_vendor-6a3288bb3aef100cad5d3497f90343103ec0f44b56f4ab0a057922302e7e77bb.js:1404 undefined
undefined
rydavim
rydavim
18,814 Points
rydavim
rydavim
18,814 Points

So, that is to be expected. value is an attribute specific to input elements. So while the p element has a textContent attribute, it does not have a value attribute.