Hi. I'd like to include a counter in text fields of limited sizes. For example: in a text question for 300 characters, a counter starts in 300 and, as respondent write, the counter shows number of characters are left till the end. Can anyone provide a solution?

This is more a general web development question (javascript) rather than a Limesurvey question:

www.sitepoint.com/10-jquery-wordtext-counter-plugins/

For a text question with question code "qtext" (200 chars. max.):

try to place in the help area of this question
for other place try:
BTW, all EM functions are listed here

Hey Ben, thank you. This works great (only tried it with the "self" version).

@Helviobritto: No need to go for a plugin. LS has this onboard solution which works great and in real time.

I suppose there is some way to change the number color when you are near or pass the limit, something like green -> orange -> red ...

Using the integrated Limesurvey Expression manager functions is indeed the best approach. We have documented the full approach at this blog post: " How to count the number of characters entered at a Limesurvey text question ". It also shows how to limit the number of characters and how to reference the character count at other questions.

@Mazi: Saw your post and tried your sample survey. Looks good. But I was able to send a text with 165 characters (according to your count). What happened?

I also noticed that when entering some dummy characters. It tuend out that character like "<" had not been counted. Could it have been a similar case? If you just enter the same character 160 times it works fine.

I did not use any special characters, if I recall right (just have a look at the last result in your demo and you'll see my text).

Here another test. I inserted this text until the text field wouldn't allow any further text.

This is a text with more than 160 characters. Let's see if it works now as expected. It should not be possible to insert more than 160 characters, but last time

Here what your demo shows me:


I copied and pasted the text into Word and it counted only 160 characters, just like Limesurvey did, but your function counted 165 characters...

I think I found the vilain. It is the ' (apostrophe).

When you insert "Let" it counts 3 characters, just as it should. If you add the apostrophe and have something like "Let'" it jumps to 9, so the apostrophe counts as 6 characters. Let's is 10 characters.

So this would explain that your count counts 165 characters, when Limesurvey stops at 160 characters. So the error is in the function "strlen" somewhere I guess?

Yes, I think so, but it is not really a bug: "strlen() returns the number of bytes rather than the number of characters in a string."
-> www.php.net/manual/en/function.strlen.php