<p>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 <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/first-person_shooter" rel="noreferrer">FPS</a> games, etc.), and then have it Ajax itself back to the server in-order to do stuff.</p>

<p>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).</p>

<p>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?</p>

Normally, it's the value property
```
```
testArea.value
```
```
Or is there something I'm missing in what you need?