DEV Community

Cover image for CSS ::placeholder and :placeholder-shown
Suprabha
Suprabha

Posted on

CSS ::placeholder and :placeholder-shown

#css #codenewbie #webdev #beginners

The `:placeholder-shown` CSS pseudo-class represents any `` or `` element that is currently displaying placeholder text.

<input type="text" placeholder="some text" />
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
input:placeholder-shown {
  font-family: "Baloo 2", cursive;
  font-weight: bold;
  background-color: pink;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Output:

placeholder shown

In above snippet,

  1. If user has not typed anything then placeholder shown background color will be pink
  2. When user has typed something then there will be no placeholder shown and the background color will be transparent

📝 NOTE: :placeholder-shown won't work if there will be no placeholder text

🗓 Example:

<input type="text" />
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
input:placeholder-shown {
  background-color: pink;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

❌ The above snippet doesn't work

:placeholder-shown vs ::placeholder 🔥

We can use :placeholder-shown to style the input element.

input:placeholder-shown {
  border: 1px solid pink;
  background: yellow;
  color: blue;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Here, we set color: blue, but it didn't work. That's because :placeholder-shown will only target the input itself. But for the actual placeholder text, you have to use the pseudo-element ::placeholder.

::placeholder pseudo-element can be used to style the placeholder text in <input> or <textarea> element.

input::placeholder {
  color: blue;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Output:

placeholder

If you wanted to add styles for empty placeholder, we can pass empty string " " as placeholder.

<input type="text" placeholder=" " />
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Output:

placeholder shown

Now, why don't we combine two selector :not and :placeholder-shown.
So we can target if the input is not empty then we can apply css.

<input placeholder="some text" value="Check with empty!" />
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
input:not(:placeholder-shown) {
  background-color: pink;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Output:

placeholder not shown

In above snippet,

  1. If the input has value then the background-color will get applied
  2. If the input is empty then background-color not applies

📝 NOTE: ::placeholder does not work with :not selector.

Reference 🧐

🌟 Twitter 👩🏻‍💻 suprabha.me 🌟 Instagram

Top comments (4)

Collapse
 
kundetiraju1 profile image
kundeti raju •

It's amazing

Collapse
 
sirseanofloxley profile image
Sean Allin Newell •

Yeah for realz, this can make a form feel way more interactive imo.

Collapse
 
sonusainibhadra profile image
sonusainibhadra •

Thanks for sharing 👍

Collapse
 
kieudac201 profile image
KieuDac201 •

good job

Read next

nas5w profile image

10x engineering for the rest of us

Nick Scialli (he/him) -

imabhinavdev profile image

Consistency in Distributed Networks

Abhinav Singh -

samulatitude profile image

I Made a Free Tool to Know My Stargazers 🌟

Samuel Pérez -

neophen profile image

Infinite horizontal scroll, vanilla CSS

Mykolas Mankevicius -