textbox characters

[Jamie_Garland]

How do i get my textbox to only accept say 200 characters in it and no more i use this code.

<tr>
		<td>Bio/About:</td>
		<td><textarea name='bio' cols='35' rows='5'></textarea></td>
	</tr>

[Justa Lol]

$bio= $_POST['bio'];

$text = substr($bio,0,200);

echo $text; 

this will only display 200 characters, of what has been submitted.

to make the textarea only allow 200 characters, you should try javascript.

[kows]

You'd want to accomplish this using JavaScript, otherwise the user has no way of knowing when they reach the character limit.

window.onload = function(){
  document.getElementById("bio").onkeypress = function(){
    // Don't let them continue typing if they're over the 200 character limit
    return !(this.value.length > 200)
  }
}

then, just modify your <textarea> to have an ID of 'bio':

<textarea name="bio" id="bio" cols="35" rows="5"></textarea>

However, just as a side note, this won't stop someone from pasting more than 200 characters into the textbox. You may want to look into having it auto-trim the textbox after losing focus or something. Then, of course you should trim the string on the server side as well.