addition operator in javascript

[rline]

Hi,

I think I'm going crazy...I have a simple script to do some calculations. If I use the *, -, or / operators, the script works fine. When I use the + operator to add, it doesn't. Instead of the output from 2+3 being 5, it's 23. The numbers being used are user-entered from a form, but I wouldn't have thought that should make a difference, since the other 3 basic operators work just fine.

Anybody seen this before? Anybody help me retain my sanity?

Thanks

[gwhitfield]

The "+" is also used as a concatenate operator. So if JS thinks you have a string, it will concatenate rather than add.

Here's what I get in the help on convertision to numbers:

<hr>As JScript is a loosely-typed language, variables in JScript technically have no fixed type. Instead, they have a type equivalent to the type of the value they contain. It is possible, under some circumstances, to force the automatic conversion (or coercion) of a variable or a piece of data into a different type. Numbers can easily be included in strings, but strings cannot be included directly in numbers, so explicit conversion functions, parseInt() and parseFloat(), are provided. <hr>

[rline]

Thanks Geoff!

The parseInt fixed it. One other question...I'm using the Math.round function, which is working fine. Is there some function that will let you round to two decimal places instead of zero?

[gwhitfield]

I'm not that much up with Javascript. My guess would be to muliply by 100, use Math.round, and divide it by 100.

[SlyBoots]

round takes two arguments. just use "2" as the second argument.

Stan Scott

[artAlexion]

Geoff,

You didn't post the relevent portion of your script, but it is clear that JS thinks the input is not numeric and is cocatenating it. The easy way around this is to first assign the input to varibles

ipt1 = the first entered number
ipt2 = the second number

Then assign the mathmatical result to a variable

sum12.value = ipt1.value + ipt2.value

Then write it to the document

document.write("The sum of the two numbers is " + sum12.value)

You may also want to do some error trapping

if(isNaN(ipt1) {
document.write("your entry for Input One, " + ipt1 + " is not a number. You must enter a number")
}

The method isNaN returns true if the parameter is not a number.

Good luck