Form validation

[Jon Lawrance]

What is wrong with my Form validation code?

<script type="text/javascript">
function validateform(fields)
{
if (email=="" | email==null | email==false) 
{
alert("Enter email");
return false;
}
}
</script>

<form id="form1" name="form1" method="post" action="step2.php" onsubmit="validateform">

Thanks,

Jon

[Force Flow]

for "OR" statements, you need to use a double pipe ||, not just a single pipe.

Also, when you want the form to be submitted, you should return true.

For the variable "email", if it's an input element, you need to get its value.

var email = document.getElementById('email').value;

If you're trying to check for a blank address, a better way to do it is to trim whitespace characters and then count the number of characters in the string

//this allows you to use the trim() function
String.prototype.trim = function () {
    return this.replace(/^\s*/, "").replace(/\s*$/, "");
}
 
 
if(email.trim().length>0){ //there are characters }
else { //there are no characters }

[Jon Lawrance]

Thank you! May I ask why doing the trim and character length is the better way?

[Force Flow]

trim is to remove any extra spaces. For instance, if someone hit the space bar a few times in the textbox, without trimming, those spaces would be counted as actual characters.

As for using length as the condition in the if-statement... it gets around having to declare those three conditions in your if-statement, and replace it with a single condition. It simplifies things.