so I'm having trouble with getting the value of a specific field in my code - I made this pretty simple example to show my problem, here is the JSFiddle:
https://jsfiddle.net/c3jtg60v/

The HTML:

<p id="theInput">

   desired-value

</p>

The Javascript:

var value = document.getElementById("theInput").value;

console.log(value);

As is, I have assigned a p element with an id of "theInput", and in it I have the desired value, that I want to make use of in my javascript.

At the moment, all I'm trying to do is console.log the value, but when I do this, all i get logged in the console is 'undefined'. What I really want to get logged to the console is "desired value",