Onclick function assignment not working

Question

I am writing a simple game and want to add a click event to the body element. But the script below does not work. Is there anything I can change to make it work?

var theBody = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
theBody.addEventListener("click", gameOver);
theBody.onclick = gameOver();
function gameOver() {
    alert("Game Over!");
}

`theBody.onclick = gameOver;` - get rid of the `()` because that means that you're *calling* the function. — Pointy, Dec 14 '15 at 04:09
`theBody.onclick = gameOver();` is not needed..Try this: https://jsfiddle.net/muevbeqm/ — Rayon, Dec 14 '15 at 04:10
@Pointy, I have edited that..What I meant was `theBody.addEventListener("click", gameOver); theBody.onclick = gameOver();` both the lines does the same operation and later one is written inappropriately.. — Rayon, Dec 14 '15 at 04:12
@Pointy, What is the point of having 2 event listener having same callback on the same element ? — Rayon, Dec 14 '15 at 04:15
@RayonDabre ah, well that's certainly a good point. I retract my statement because you're 100% correct, and I offer my apologies. — Pointy, Dec 14 '15 at 04:15
@Pointy, he he.. May be I need to work on framing sentences :P — Rayon, Dec 14 '15 at 04:17
Possible duplicate of [JavaScript - onclick event getting called automatically](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10101899/javascript-onclick-event-getting-called-automatically) — Sebastian Simon, Dec 14 '15 at 04:32

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 14 '15 at 04:13

1

Use this:

document.body.addEventListener("click", gameOver);

Or this:

document.body.onclick = gameOver; // no brackets

Not both.

answered Dec 14 '15 at 04:13

Charles Clayton

17,005
11
87
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Thank you. I removed some code and now the code is as below. But it still doesn't work... theBody.addEventListener("click", gameOver); function gameOver() { alert("Game Over!"); } – susansecret Dec 14 '15 at 04:28

score -1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 14 '15 at 04:27

-1

Try this:

document.getElementsByTagName("body ").addEventListener("click", function(){
    gameOver();
});
function gameOver() {
    alert("Game Over!");
}

answered Dec 14 '15 at 04:27

Meenakshi

165
1
8

@susansecret [No, this absolutely does not work...](http://jsfiddle.net/5wvb654u/) It throws the error `document.getElementsByTagName(...).addEventListener is not a function` because you can't assign an event listener to an array. It's also terrible style because you're creating a function just to call another function. – Charles Clayton Dec 14 '15 at 06:10

Onclick function assignment not working

2 Answers2