javascript - Getting HTML elements by their attribute names

Question

There are methods available in JavaScript to get HTML elements using their ID, Class and Tag.

document.getElementByID(*id*);
document.getElementsByClassName(*class*);
document.getElementsByTagName(*tag*);

Is there any method available to get the elements according to the attribute name.

EX:

<span property="v:name">Basil Grilled Tomatoes and Onions</span>

Like:

document.getElementsByAttributeName("property");

Answer 1

Yes, the function is querySelectorAll (or querySelector for a single element), which allows you to use CSS selectors to find elements.

document.querySelectorAll('[property]'); // All with attribute named "property"
document.querySelectorAll('[property="value"]'); // All with "property" set to "value" exactly.

(Complete list of attribute selectors on MDN.)

This finds all elements with the attribute property. It would be better to specify a tag name if possible:

document.querySelectorAll('span[property]');

You can work around this if necessary by looping through all the elements on the page to see whether they have the attribute set:

var withProperty = [],
    els = document.getElementsByTagName('span'), // or '*' for all types of element
    i = 0;

for (i = 0; i < els.length; i++) {
    if (els[i].hasAttribute('property')) {
        withProperty.push(els[i]);
    }
}

Libraries such as jQuery handle this for you; it's probably a good idea to let them do the heavy lifting.

For anyone dealing with ancient browsers, note that querySelectorAll was introduced to Internet Explorer in v8 (2009) and fully supported in IE9. All modern browsers support it.