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JavaScript

SAMUEL LAWRENCE
PLUS
SAMUEL LAWRENCE
Courses Plus Student 8,447 Points
Posted by SAMUEL LAWRENCE
SAMUEL LAWRENCE
Courses Plus Student 8,447 Points

What's wrong with this question?

Hi guys, in the Selecting Elements with the Same Class Name Quiz,

page link: https://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-and-the-dom-2/getting-a-handle-on-the-dom/selection-review

one of the questions were,

How would you select the body element using the document.getElementsByTagName, and store it in the variable body? Hint: Don’t forget that this method returns a collection, not a single element.

const body = _______________

I wrote ; const body = document.getElementsByTagName('body');

but got that as a wrong answer. What am I missing?

FYI when I ran this code in my text editor I didn't get any errors. Why is it a wrong answer here?

1 Answer

andren
andren
28,558 Points
andren
andren
28,558 Points

As the question's hint points out the getElementsByTagName method returns a collection of elements, it does not return a specific element. This is the case even if there is only one element matching the tag you pass into it.

That means that your code stores a collection of HTML elements in the body constant rather than storing the body element itself. To pull out the body element you can use standard bracket notation like you would do on an array.

Like this:

const body = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]; // Pull out the HTML element at index 0

That would pull out the first element in the collection, which will be the body element itself.

SAMUEL LAWRENCE
SAMUEL LAWRENCE
Courses Plus Student 8,447 Points
SAMUEL LAWRENCE
SAMUEL LAWRENCE
Courses Plus Student 8,447 Points

Nice one. Thanks. The thought crossed my mind but didn't do it.