1. Home

JavaScript DOM Elements

This page teaches you how to find and access HTML elements in an HTML page

Finding HTML Elements

Often, with JavaScript, you want to manipulate HTML elements.

To do so, you have to find the elements first. There are several ways to do this:

  • Finding HTML elements by id
  • Finding HTML elements by tag name
  • Finding HTML elements by class name
  • Finding HTML elements by CSS selectors
  • Finding HTML elements by HTML object collections

    • Finding HTML Element by Id

    The easiest way to find an HTML element in the DOM, is by using the element id.

    This example finds the element with id="intro":

    Example

    const element = document.getElementById("intro");

    If the element is found, the method will return the element as an object (in element).

    If the element is not found, element will contain null.

    Finding HTML Elements by Tag Name

    This example finds all <p> elements:

    Example

    const element = document.getElementsByTagName("p");

    This example finds the element with id="main", and then finds all <p> elements inside "main":

    Example

    const x = document.getElementById("main");
    const y = x.getElementsByTagName("p");

    Finding HTML Elements by Class Name

    If you want to find all HTML elements with the same class name, use getElementsByClassName().

    This example returns a list of all elements with class="intro".

    Example

    const x = document.getElementsByClassName("intro");

    Finding HTML Elements by CSS Selectors

    If you want to find all HTML elements that match a specified CSS selector (id, class names, types, attributes, values of attributes, etc), use the querySelectorAll() method.

    This example returns a list of all <p> elements with class="intro".

    Example

    const x = document.querySelectorAll("p.intro");

    Finding HTML Elements by HTML Object Collections

    This example finds the form element with id="frm1", in the forms collection, and displays all element values:

    Example

    const x = document.forms["frm1"];
    let text = "";
    for (let i = 0; i < x.length; i++) {
      text += x.elements[i].value + "<br>";
    }
    document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = text;

    The following HTML objects (and object collections) are also accessible:

  • document.anchors
  • document.body
  • document.documentElement
  • document.embeds
  • document.forms
  • document.head
  • document.images
  • document.links
  • document.scripts
  • document.title

    • Test Yourself With Exercises

    Exercise:

    Use the getElementById method to find the <p> element, and change its text to "Hello".

    <p id="demo"></p>

<script>
 = "Hello";
</script>

    Start the Exercise

    Categories

    HTML CSS3 Bootstrap Foundation Sass JavaScript TypeScript JQuery AngularJS React NodeJS Highcharts PHP Python Python3 Django Linux Docker Ruby Java C C ++ Perl Servlet JSP Lua Scala Go ASP C # SQL MySQL SQLite MongoDB Redis Android Swift ionic Kotlin XML tutorial

    Contact US