dom - How can I determine the type of an HTML element in JavaScript?

Question

I need a way to determine the type of an HTML element in JavaScript. It has the ID, but the element itself could be a <div>, a <form> field, a <fieldset>, etc. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

nodeName is the attribute you are looking for. For example:

var elt = document.getElementById('foo');
console.log(elt.nodeName);

Note that nodeName returns the element name capitalized and without the angle brackets, which means that if you want to check if an element is an <div> element you could do it as follows:

elt.nodeName == "DIV"

While this would not give you the expected results:

elt.nodeName == "<div>"