I'm pleased to introduce Unleashed Technologies' first open-source project, "maxchars"!  maxchars is a jQuery plugin for easily adding and enforcing character limits on input elements with a friendly UI.  It works similar to Twitter, where users are presented with a helpful message stating the number of remaining characters or notifying them if they've exceeded the limit.  Similar plugins already exist, but we wanted to design something far simpler and easy to integrate.

Download & Source Code

The plugin can be downloaded here: Download maxchars v1.0.0.

The source code is also available on GitHub: http://github.com/unleashtech/maxchars

Examples:

Here's a simple example to get started:

$('#someElement').maxchars(250);

The code above would immediately enforce a 250 character limit on #someElement. The UI message would be automatically created and inserted after the element.

You can also pass an object with different settings to tweak it's behavior:

$('#someElement').maxchars({
    maxChars: 140,
    showExtraChars: true,
    messageHolder: $('div.messagebox')
});

Demo

We created a simple HTML page you can use to see how it works: try it here

Documentation

To enable maxchars on an element (or multiple elements), use the following code:

$('#someElement').maxchars(options);

The simplest way to use this is providing the maximum number of characters like so:

$('#someElement').maxchars(250);

There are also 3 methods which can be called like so:

$('#someElement').maxchars('methodname');