How does isValidEmail method link to the code in this challege?

Question

Hi all,
This is more of an observational point than a question but I'm reviewing my progress so far in the "Build an Interactive Website" course.
In the second stage there's a challenge that asks us to create a method, with the name isValidEmail that passes into it one argument, for which is used the name email
My answer to the challenge is the following. 
javascript
function isValidEmail(email) {
    return email.indexOf("@") != -1;
};

and it passes. Cool!
But when I looked at the index.html file in the challenge, there doesn't appear to be an email field. So no real method of checking whether the @ symbol actually appears for a valid email.  No default text for it to check.
I'm assuming this is okay for the purposes of this challenge but I just wanted to nail down how this works in practice.  
I used email for my argument.  Following along in the videos, it uses email for it's for, id and name attributes. Is this how it jQuery figures out which input field to check?
Be good to see peoples thoughts.  :-)

Dino Paškvan · Answer

In this case, the isValidEmail method doesn't check a particular field. It's a generic function that tests a string, and the source of that string can be pretty much anything — a variable, a string literal, return value of some other method...
The email parameter is the internal name for whatever is passed to the isValidEmail, it's just a way to reference the argument passed to the method inside the method.
To actually get a value from some input field (when using jQuery), you'd want to add an id to that field (or a name, or even a class) so you can select that field (using a jQuery selector) and get its value. Then you'd pass that value to the isValidEmail method.
For example:
html
<input type="text" name="email" id="email">

With such an input field, you could have this piece of code checking the value
javascript
if (isValidEmail($('#email').val())) {
   // do something
}

or this:
```javascript
if (isValidEmail($('input[name="email"]').val())) {
   // do something
}
```

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Jonathan Grieve

Jonathan Grieve

How does isValidEmail method link to the code in this challege?

1 Answer

Dino Paškvan

Dino Paškvan

Jonathan Grieve

Jonathan Grieve