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JavaScript JavaScript and the DOM (Retiring) Making Changes to the DOM Appending Nodes

Posted by ja5on
ja5on
10,338 Points

What does getElementsByTagName do?

I understand getElementsById but just wanted a quick idea of what getElementsByTagName means and does?

Does it select all elements on the page with the same tag/element name?

1 Answer

Blake Larson
Blake Larson
13,014 Points
Blake Larson
Blake Larson
13,014 Points

Yup, it returns a collection of all elements in the document with that specified tag name, as an HTMLCollection (array like list of html elements) object.

So if you wanted the body element of the document you could use

  document.getElementsByTagName("BODY")[0]

Since there is only 1 body tag on the document the node list has a length of 1 or index 0.