Element.getAttribute()
The getAttribute()
method of the
Element
interface returns the value of a specified attribute on the
element.
If the given attribute does not exist, the value returned will
either be null
or ""
(the empty string); see Non-existing attributes for details.
Syntax
let attribute = element.getAttribute(attributeName);
where
-
attribute
is a string containing the value ofattributeName
. -
attributeName
is the name of the attribute whose value you want to get.
Examples
<!-- example div in an html DOC -->
<div id="div1">Hi Champ!</div>
// in a console
const div1 = document.getElementById('div1');
//=> <div id="div1">Hi Champ!</div>
const exampleAttr= div1.getAttribute('id');
//=> "div1"
const align = div1.getAttribute('align')
//=> null
Description
Lower casing
When called on an HTML element in a DOM flagged as an HTML document,
getAttribute()
lower-cases its argument before proceeding.
Non-existing attributes
Essentially all web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, recent versions of Opera,
Safari, Konqueror, and iCab, as a non-exhaustive list) return null
when
the specified attribute does not exist on the specified element; this is what the current DOM
specification draft specifies. The old DOM 3 Core specification, on the other
hand, says that the correct return value in this case is actually the empty
string, and some DOM implementations implement this behavior. The
implementation of getAttribute()
in XUL (Gecko) actually follows the DOM
3 Core specification and returns an empty string. Consequently, you should use
element.hasAttribute()
to check for an attribute's existence prior to
calling getAttribute()
if it is possible that the requested attribute
does not exist on the specified element.
Retrieving nonce values
For security reasons, CSP nonces from non-script
sources, such as CSS selectors, and .getAttribute("nonce")
calls are
hidden.
let nonce = script.getAttribute('nonce');
// returns empty string
Instead of retrieving the nonce from the content attribute, use the
nonce
property:
let nonce = script.nonce;
Specifications
Specification |
---|
DOM Standard # ref-for-dom-element-getattribute① |
Browser compatibility
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