Getting the value of a Textarea using a lightbox

Hey Guys,

I'm trying to get the value of a textarea after a click event is fired. I'm able to achieve this with the code below when I don't display the textarea in a lightbox.

Basically, I have a link that triggers a lightbox which displays the textarea. When someone enters something into the textarea and clicks insert, I'm trying to get the value via a jquery function and alert it.

LIGHTBOX

<a href="#free_text" rel="facebox">Add Text (Display lightbox with textarea)</a>

// Lightbox with textarea
   <div id="free_text" style="display:none;">
  
<TEXTAREA NAME="freetext" id="freetext" class="freetext"></TEXTAREA><br/>
<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Insert"  class="insert" id="<?php echo $row->id; ?>">

  </div>

When I click insert above the value does not get passed to the function below. But works fine when not using the lightbox.

JQUERY

$(function() {
$(".insert").live('click', function() {

	var description = $("#freetext").val();
	alert(description);

	$.facebox.close(); 
	return false;
});
});

try using $('#freetext').text() or $('#freetext').html(), because textarea is a tag with no value... only innerHTML or innerText if you will.

Thanks for your reply but with both of them it still doesnt return a value. I'm just thinking, does it have anything to do with the fact the div that contains the textarea is set as display:none; initially in the css and it's unable to get the value or html of it because of this?

you've binded click to the live() function, I don't see why it should be a problem.  You really only need the live function for dynamic input's.. i.e. inputs that weren't originally in the HTML.  display:none only means it's not displayed, but it still appears in the source code.  If you use a function like append of prepend or something to place another input on the page.. then you would use live() to access that input's click function.