Prevent empty submissions in <textarea>

Question

I installed <textarea>and functions that pick up keystrokes. I set where, if the user presses Enter, the text entered in the text area will be sent to the database.

However, I want to prevent sending empty text by simply pressing Enter and sending. I also noticed that when I enter a new line, a new line is created, so I can’t just check if the text is "" or its length is 0, because the second time there will be a new line.

jQuery for keyboard detection:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('.active-buddy-tab div#chat-window form#chat-message textarea#message').live('keydown', function(event) {

        var key = event.which;

        // all keys including return
        if (key >= 33) {

            var maxLength = $(this).attr("maxlength");
            var length = this.value.length;

            if (length >= maxLength) {
                event.preventDefault();
            }
        }
    });

    $('.active-buddy-tab div#chat-window form#chat-message textarea#message').live('keyup', function(e) {

        if (e.keyCode == 13) {

            var text = $(this).val();
            var maxLength = $(this).attr("maxlength");
            var length = text.length;

            var to = $('.active-buddy-tab div h3 p#to').text();

            if (length <= maxLength + 1) {
                chat.send(text, from, to);
                chat.update(from, to);
                $(this).val("");
            } else {
                $(this).val(text.substring(0, maxLength));
            }

        }
    });
});

So how can I prevent sending an empty message? I apologize if this is really simple, maybe I think too much about it.

Thank you Christo

Answer 1

if( $.trim( $(this).val() ) == "" ) // empty

trim