Grabbing arbitrary elements from the DOM

29Mar/060

Grabbing arbitrary elements from the DOM

In the Javascript library I'm working on, I needed to be able to grab all of the elements in the page DOM that had a certain attribute. There isn't any way through the DOM to currently do this. So I came up with this little function. It appears to be working, but I haven't tested it with a very complicated page yet. The library is based on the Dojo toolset, so I'm leveraging some of it's built in methods like forEach. Right now it just returns a standard Javascript array like the other dom get* methods, but that may change to a hashtable at some point.

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

if(document.getElementsByAttribute == undefined) {
document.getElementsByAttribute = function(attribute, parentElement) {
var _selectedElements = new Array();
var _allElements = document.body.getElementsByTagName('*');
dojo.lang.forEach(_allElements,
function(node) { //have to use getAttributeNode since it's the only one supported by all browsers
if (node.getAttributeNode(attribute) != undefined) {
_selectedElements.push(node);
}
}, true);
return _selectedElements;
}
}

n.b. There's a bug in the code. It doesn't actually use the parentElement if it's provided. It's pretty trivial to make it work. Eventually I'll update this code with the fixed code.

Filed under: General, Javascript Leave a comment

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