Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

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

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

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!

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

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.