Ian,
See the docs on how to develop a jQuery Plugin.
http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Authoring.
However, since your code applies to each instance of a given class and
not specific elements it already appears to do what you want.
For example I changed your form to have two inputs and gave the second
one a maxlength of 40 for fun. I didn't change any JS code and both
text inputs reflected remaining characters correctly. As long as you
use that label > input > span structure and give the input
class="word_count" you can reuse that code.
<form action="" method="post">
<div class="input">
<label for="field1">Text:</label>
<input type="text" name="field1" id="field1" maxlength="50"
class="word_count" />
<span class="counter"></span> character(s) available
</div>
<!-- New Text Input here -->
<div class="input">
<label for="field2">Text:</label>
<input type="text" name="field3" id="field1" maxlength="40"
class="word_count" />
<span class="counter"></span> character(s) available
</div>
</form>
On Mar 10, 5:42 pm, IanR <i...@ianroke.co.uk> wrote:
> I have got some codehttp://pastebin.com/mc99132cwhich counts how
> many characters have been entered in a textbox and subtracts it from
> the maxlength to show how many characters are left.
>
> If I add a new textbox I don't want to copy and paste the code down
> and rename the variables so is there a way of navigating the DOM tree
> to change just the element currently being edited?
>
> Cheers, Ian.http://pastebin.com/mc99132c
