Name
Element.getElementsByTagName( ) — find descendant elements with a specified tag name
Availability
DOM Level 1 Core
Synopsis
Node[] getElementsByTagName(String name
);
Arguments
-
name
The tag name of the desired elements, or the value “*” to specify that all descendant elements should be returned, regardless of their tag names.
Returns
An array (technically, a NodeList) of Element objects that are descendants of this element and have the specified tag name.
Description
This method traverses all descendants of this element and returns an array (really a NodeList object) of Element nodes representing all document elements with the specified tag name. The elements in the returned array appear in the same order in which they appear in the source document.
Note that the Document interface also has a
getElementsByTagName( )
method that works just
like this one but that traverses the entire document, rather than
just the descendants of a single element. Do not confuse this method
with HTMLDocument.getElementsByName( )
, which
searches for elements based on the value of their
name
attributes rather than by their tag names.
Example
You can find all <div>
tags in a document
with code like the following:
var divisions = document.body.getElementsByTagName("div");
And you can find all <p>
tags within the a
<div>
tag with code like this:
var paragraphs = divisions[0].getElementsByTagname("p");
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