Element.attributes

The Element.attributes property returns a live collection of all attribute nodes registered to the specified node. It is a NamedNodeMap, not an Array, so it has no Array methods and the Attr nodes' indexes may differ among browsers. To be more specific, attributes is a key/value pair of strings that represents any information regarding that attribute.

Value

A NamedNodeMap object.

Examples

Basic examples

// Get the first <p> element in the document
var para = document.getElementsByTagName("p")[0];
var atts = para.attributes;

Enumerating elements attributes

Numerical indexing is useful for going through all of an element's attributes. The following example runs through the attribute nodes for the element in the document with id "paragraph", and prints each attribute's value.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

 <head>
  <title>Attributes example</title>
  <script type="text/javascript">
   function listAttributes() {
     var paragraph = document.getElementById("paragraph");
     var result = document.getElementById("result");

     // First, let's verify that the paragraph has some attributes
     if (paragraph.hasAttributes()) {
       var attrs = paragraph.attributes;
       var output = "";
       for(var i = attrs.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
         output += attrs[i].name + "->" + attrs[i].value;
       }
       result.value = output;
     } else {
       result.value = "No attributes to show";
     }
   }
  </script>
 </head>

<body>
 <p id="paragraph" style="color: green;">Sample Paragraph</p>
 <form action="">
  <p>
    <input type="button" value="Show first attribute name and value"
      onclick="listAttributes();">
    <input id="result" type="text" value="">
  </p>
 </form>
</body>
</html>

Specifications

Specification
DOM Standard
# dom-element-attributes

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also

  • NamedNodeMap, the interface of the returned object
  • Cross-browser compatibility considerations: on quirksmode