How to check whether CKEditor has some text in it?

Question

I have an HTML form with a few fields. One of them is a textarea managed by CKEditor.

When the user wants to submit the form, I want to check whether he entered values

Answer 1

We use prototype, with that library and the following addition:

Element.addMethods({  
  getInnerText: function(element) {
    element = $(element);
    return element.innerText && !window.opera ? element.innerText
      : element.innerHTML.stripScripts().unescapeHTML().replace(/[\n\r\s]+/g, ' ');
  }
});

(Thanks to Tobie Langel)

I was able to use the following function to determine whether any actual text was inside CKEditor:

function editorEmpty(instanceName){

    var ele = (new Element('div')).update(CKEDITOR.instances[instanceName].getData()); 

    return (ele.getInnerText() == '' || innerText.search(/^( )+$/i) == 0);
}

Note the test for   as well - often when the editor appears empty, it actually contains something like:

 

.