What Are Radio Buttons?

Value

The value attribute is a string containing the radio button's value. The value is never shown to the user by their user agent. Instead, it's used to identify which radio button in a group is selected.

Defining a radio group

A radio group is defined by giving each of radio buttons in the group the same name. Once a radio group is established, selecting any radio button in that group automatically deselects any currently-selected radio button in the same group.

You can have as many radio groups on a page as you like, as long as each has its own unique name.

For example, if your form needs to ask the user for their preferred contact method, you might create three radio buttons, each with the name property set to contact but one with the value email, one with the value phone, and one with the value mail. The user never sees the value or the name (unless you expressly add code to display it).

The resulting HTML looks like this:

<form>
  <fieldset>
    <legend>Please select your preferred contact method:</legend>
    <div>
      <input type="radio" id="contactChoice1" name="contact" value="email" />
      <label for="contactChoice1">Email</label>

      <input type="radio" id="contactChoice2" name="contact" value="phone" />
      <label for="contactChoice2">Phone</label>

      <input type="radio" id="contactChoice3" name="contact" value="mail" />
      <label for="contactChoice3">Mail</label>
    </div>
    <div>
      <button type="submit">Submit</button>
    </div>
  </fieldset>
</form>

Here you see the three radio buttons, each with the name set to contact and each with a unique value that uniquely identifies that individual radio button within the group. They each also have a unique id, which is used by the <label> element's for attribute to associate the labels with the radio buttons.

You can try out this example here (the submit button does not do anything yet):

Data representation of a radio group

When the above form is submitted with a radio button selected, the form's data includes an entry in the form contact=value. For example, if the user clicks on the "Phone" radio button then submits the form, the form's data will include the line contact=phone.

If you omit the value attribute in the HTML, the submitted form data assigns the value on to the group. In this scenario, if the user clicked on the "Phone" option and submitted the form, the resulting form data would be contact=on, which isn't helpful. So don't forget to set your value attributes!

Note: If no radio button is selected when the form is submitted, the radio group is not included in the submitted form data at all, since there is no value to report.

It's fairly uncommon to actually want to allow the form to be submitted without any of the radio buttons in a group selected, so it is usually wise to have one default to the checked state. See Selecting a radio button by default below.

Let's add a bit of code to our example so we can examine the data generated by this form. The HTML is revised to add a <pre> block to output the form data into:

<form>
  <fieldset>
    <legend>Please select your preferred contact method:</legend>
    <div>
      <input type="radio" id="contactChoice1" name="contact" value="email" />
      <label for="contactChoice1">Email</label>
      <input type="radio" id="contactChoice2" name="contact" value="phone" />
      <label for="contactChoice2">Phone</label>
      <input type="radio" id="contactChoice3" name="contact" value="mail" />
      <label for="contactChoice3">Mail</label>
    </div>
    <div>
      <button type="submit">Submit</button>
    </div>
  </fieldset>
</form>
<pre id="log"></pre>

Then we add some JavaScript to set up an event listener on the submit event, which is sent when the user clicks the "Submit" button:

const form = document.querySelector("form");
const log = document.querySelector("#log");

form.addEventListener(
  "submit",
  (event) => {
    const data = new FormData(form);
    let output = "";
    for (const entry of data) {
      output = `${output}${entry[0]}=${entry[1]}\r`;
    }
    log.innerText = output;
    event.preventDefault();
  },
  false,
);

Try this example with the Submit button and see how there's never more than one result for the contact group.