As long as your selector is actually working, I see nothing wrong with your code that checks the length of the array. That should do what you want. There are a lot of ways to clean up your code to be simpler and more readable. Here’s a cleaned up version with notes about what I cleaned up.
var album_text = []; $("input[name='album_text[]']").each(function() { var value = $(this).val(); if (value) { album_text.push(value); } }); if (album_text.length === 0) { $('#error_message').html("Error"); } else { //send data }
Some notes on what you were doing and what I changed.
$(this)
is always a valid jQuery object so there’s no reason to ever checkif ($(this))
. It may not have any DOM objects inside it, but you can check that with$(this).length
if you need to, but that is not necessary here because the.each()
loop wouldn’t run if there were no items so$(this)
inside your.each()
loop will always be something.- It’s inefficient to use $(this) multiple times in the same function. Much better to get it once into a local variable and then use it from that local variable.
- It’s recommended to initialize arrays with
[]
rather thannew Array()
. if (value)
when value is expected to be a string will both protect fromvalue == null
,value == undefined
andvalue == ""
so you don’t have to doif (value && (value != ""))
. You can just do:if (value)
to check for all three empty conditions.if (album_text.length === 0)
will tell you if the array is empty as long as it is a valid, initialized array (which it is here).
What are you trying to do with this selector $("input[name='album_text[]']")
?