Character Limit in HTML

Question

How do you impose a character limit on a text input in HTML?

Yogh

Answer 1

There are 2 main solutions:

The pure HTML one:

<input type="text" id="Textbox" name="Textbox" maxlength="10" />

The JavaScript one (attach it to a onKey Event):

function limitText(limitField, limitNum) {
    if (limitField.value.length > limitNum) {
        limitField.value = limitField.value.substring(0, limitNum);
    } 
}

But anyway, there is no good solution. You can not adapt to every client's bad HTML implementation, it's an impossible fight to win. That's why it's far better to check it on the server side, with a PHP / Python / whatever script.

Paoting

Check on the server as a final sanity check, but add client-side enhancement if you can do so; it makes for a richer user experience. – Joyance

Answer 2

there's a maxlength attribute

<input type="text" name="textboxname" maxlength="100" />

Thermaesthesia

This is true, but some clients don't check this. This is especcially true for mobile phone based clients. – Byway

There are also ways to remove them. For example the Firefox Web Developer Extension has a Remove Maximum lengths function. – Antiphonal

With chrome and it's developer kit (which comes with the browser) it's simple to remove such things in the html – Leo

Answer 3

In addition to the above, I would like to point out that client-side validation (HTML code, javascript, etc.) is never enough. Also check the length server-side, or just don't check at all (if it's not so important that people can be allowed to get around it, then it's not important enough to really warrant any steps to prevent that, either).

Also, fellows, he (or she) said HTML, not XHTML. ;)

Footrest

i agree. one can POST data directly into a web site using some scripting tool, so in that case maxlength and other browser-side validations are not foolproof – Thermaesthesia

or use firebug and remove the maxlength attribute. – Coif

Answer 4

use the "maxlength" attribute as others have said.

if you need to put a max character length on a text AREA, you need to turn to Javascript. Take a look here: How to impose maxlength on textArea in HTML using JavaScript

Washer

check this link in StackOverflow: #1125982 – Estremadura

Answer 5

For the <input> element there's the maxlength attribute:

<input type="text" id="Textbox" name="Textbox" maxlength="10" />

(by the way, the type is "text", not "textbox" as others are writing), however, you have to use javascript with <textarea>s. Either way the length should be checked on the server anyway.

Brit

Answer 6

you can set maxlength with jquery which is very fast

jQuery(document).ready(function($){ //fire on DOM ready
 setformfieldsize(jQuery('#comment'), 50, 'charsremain')
})

Cornela