Creating a Character Count Progress Bar in React

#javascript #webdev #programming #react

Hello guys
In this short tutorial, we will be looking into how to create a Character Count Progress Bar in React JS.
Common uses of this are in notes and to-do list applications where you want to restrict user input to a fixed amount of characters. We can visualize this to improve user experience using a linear progress bar.

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Create a simple text area

Firstly lets create a simple text area in a new react app. Your App.js should contain the following code:



import { React, useState } from "react";
import "./styles.css";

export default function App() {
  return (
    <div className="App">
      <textarea cols="20" rows="5"></textarea>
      <div className="progress">
        <span className="charLeft"> characters left</span>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

Here we have created a simple react app with a text area and a div containing a span that will show the number of characters left.

Restricting the number of characters

The maximum number of characters that a user can type can be easily set using the maxLength of textarea as follows:



<textarea maxLength="100" cols="20" rows="5"></textarea>

Storing input text

Next, we need to store the input that the user gives in a state so that we can use that for the progress bar and span. We will create a simple state and an onchange function that will update it every time the user types something.



import { React, useState } from "react";
import "./styles.css";
export default function App() {
  const [input, setInput] = useState("");
  const inputHandler = (e) => {
    setInput(e.target.value);
  };
  return (
    <div className="App">
      <textarea
        maxLength="100"
        cols="20"
        rows="5"
        onChange={inputHandler}
      ></textarea>
      <div className="progress">
        <span className="charLeft">
           characters left
        </span>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

Displaying characters left

Now we need to display the number of characters left which will be 100 - the length of the input.



<span className="charLeft">
    {100 - input.length} characters left
</span>

Creating the progress bar

For the linear progress bar, we can use the material ui progress bars. For this, firstly install mui:
npm install @mui/material
Next, we need to import the linear progress component:



import LinearProgress from "@mui/material/LinearProgress";

The value or "progress" of the bar is defined by the value prop and the type of the bar is determinate which is assigned by the variant prop.



<LinearProgress

  className="charProgress"

  variant="determinate"

  value={input.length}

/>

Wrapping Up

We are now done and this will be the complete code:



import { React, useState } from "react";

import "./styles.css";

import LinearProgress from "@mui/material/LinearProgress";

export default function App() {

  const [input, setInput] = useState("");

  const inputHandler = (e) => {

    setInput(e.target.value);

  };

  return (

    <div className="App">

      <textarea

        maxLength="100"

        cols="20"

        rows="5"

        onChange={inputHandler}

      ></textarea>

      <div className="progress">

        <span className="charLeft">{100 - input.length} characters left</span>

        <LinearProgress

          className="charProgress"

          variant="determinate"

          value={input.length}

        />

      </div>

    </div>

  );

}