How can I perform jquery validation to check if a textarea contains no html tags? (error if it does)

(BTW I am preventing html from coming through on the server anyway)

How can I perform jquery validation to check if a textarea contains no html tags? (error if it does)

(BTW I am preventing html from coming through on the server anyway)

• javascript
• jquery
• validation

2 Answers 2

You could use John Resig's HTML parser (here), or maybe a more naive solution that just looks for opening tags.

$('textarea').each(function() {
   if ($(this).val().match(/<(\w+)((?:\s+\w+(?:\s*=\s*(?:(?:"[^"]*")|(?:'[^']*')|[^>\s]+))?)*)\s*(\/?)>/)) {
      alert('html found');
   }
});

Neal's solution suffers from false positives on textareas that contain valid jquery selectors, such as a textarea that contains just "a".

try this on for size:

$('textarea').each(function(){
    var text = $(this).text();
    if($(text).length > 0){
        console.log('contains html elements')
    }
    else {
        console.log('no html elements')
    }
});

fiddle is here