html - How to loop through elements of forms with JavaScript?

Question

I have a form:

<form method="POST" action="submit.php">
    <input type="text" value="1">
    <input type="text" value="2">
    <input type="text" value="3">
    <input type="text" value="4">
    <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

How can I loop over the input elements in the form (in order to perform some validation on them)?

I'd prefer to use only pure JavaScript, not jQuery or another library. I'd also like to limit the iteration to form elements, not any other elements which may be added to the form.

Answer 1

You need to get a reference of your form, and after that you can iterate the elements collection. So, assuming for instance:

<form method="POST" action="submit.php" id="my-form">
  ..etc..
</form>

You will have something like:

var elements = document.getElementById("my-form").elements;

for (var i = 0, element; element = elements[i++];) {
    if (element.type === "text" && element.value === "")
        console.log("it's an empty textfield")
}

Notice that in browser that would support querySelectorAll you can also do something like:

var elements = document.querySelectorAll("#my-form input[type=text][value='']")

And you will have in elements just the element that have an empty value attribute. Notice however that if the value is changed by the user, the attribute will be remain the same, so this code is only to filter by attribute not by the object's property. Of course, you can also mix the two solution:

var elements = document.querySelectorAll("#my-form input[type=text]")

for (var i = 0, element; element = elements[i++];) {
    if (element.value === "")
        console.log("it's an empty textfield")
}

You will basically save one check.