Depenends on if you want the plain text or not. If you want the actuall contents (EG html tags if it's type text/html , or rtf tags if it's text/rtf) or it's just type text/plain, just use input.getText(), if you're using any "rich" text format but you still just want the plain text, you can use input.getDocument().getText(0, input.getDocument().getLength());
Okay, I just wrote all that, then realized you said jtextarea, not jeditorpane or jtextpane, so everything i dsaid about rich text is inapplicable. =\ Anywasy, input.getText() is correct, why did you think it wasn't?