Availability

JavaScript 1.0

Synopsis

window.confirm(question)

Arguments

question

The plain text (not HTML) string to be displayed in the dialog box. It should generally express a question you want the user to answer.

Returns

true if the user clicks the OK button; false if the user clicks the Cancel button.

Description

The confirm( ) method displays the specified question in a dialog box that pops up over window. The appearance of the dialog box is platform-dependent, but it generally contains graphics that indicate that the user is being asked a question. The dialog box contains OK and Cancel buttons that the user can use to answer the question. If the user clicks the OK button, confirm( ) returns true. If the user clicks Cancel, confirm( ) returns false.

The dialog box that is displayed by the confirm( ) method is modal -- that is, it blocks all user input to the main browser window until the user dismisses the dialog box by clicking on the OK or Cancel buttons. Since this method returns a value depending on the user's response to the dialog box, JavaScript execution pauses in the call to confirm( ), and subsequent statements are not executed until the user responds to the dialog box.

Usage

Note that the question displayed in the dialog box is a string of plain text, not formatted HTML. You can use the newline character, "\n", in your strings to break your question across multiple lines. You can also do some rudimentary formatting using spaces and can approximate horizontal rules with underscore characters, but the results depend greatly on the font used in the dialog box and thus are system-dependent.

Also, there is no way to change the labels that appear in the buttons of the dialog box (to make them read Yes and No, for example). Therefore, you should take care to phrase your question or message in such a way that OK and Cancel are suitable responses.

See Also

Window.alert( ), Window.prompt( )