jQuery get textarea text

Recently I have started playing with jQuery, and have been following a couple of tutorials. Now I feel slightly competent with using it (it's pretty easy), and I thought it would be cool if I were able to make a 'console' on my webpage (as in, you press the ` key like you do in FPS games, etc.), and then have it Ajax itself back to the server in-order to do stuff.

I originally thought the best way would be to just get the text inside the textarea, and then split it, or should I use the keyup event, convert the keycode returned to an ASCII character, append the character to a string and send the string to the server (then empty the string).

I couldn't find any information on getting text from a textarea, all I got was keyup information. Also, how can I convert the keycode returned to an ASCII character?

Why would you want to convert key strokes to text? Add a button that sends the text inside the textarea to the server when clicked. You can get the text using the value attribute as the poster before has pointed out, or using jQuery's API:

$('input#mybutton').click(function() {
    var text = $('textarea#mytextarea').val();
    //send to server and process response
});

Where it is often the text function you use (e.g. in divs etc) then for text area it is val

get:

$('#myTextBox').val();

set:

$('#myTextBox').val('new value');

You should have a div that just contains the console messages, that is, previous commands and their output. And underneath put an input or textarea that just holds the command you are typing.

-------------------------------
| consle output ...           |
| more output                 |
| prevous commands and data   |
-------------------------------
> This is an input box.

That way you just send the value of the input box to the server for processing, and append the result to the console messages div.

Normally, it's the value property

testArea.value

Or is there something I'm missing in what you need?

I have figured out that I can convert the keyCode of the event to a character by using the following function:

var char = String.fromCharCode(v_code);

From there I would then append the character to a string, and when the enter key is pressed send the string to the server. I'm sorry if my question seemed somewhat cryptic, and the title meaning something almost completely off-topic, it's early in the morning and I haven't had breakfast yet ;).

Thanks for all your help guys.