Tech Stuff - DOM NodeList Interface Reference

Describes methods and Properties (attributes) of the NodeList Interface. W3C Reference.

NodeList Interface

A NodeList is an array of Nodes returned by various methods, for example, getElementsByTagName. In some cases the nodeType is implicit (for example, all nodes returned by getElementsByTagName are HTMLElement) in other cases the nodeType may have to be tested.

Methods

item

An alternative method of accessing items in an array such as
a NodeList. Thus the following two examples are funtionally identical
node = NodeList[2];
node = NodeList.item(2);

Attributes

length

x = NodeList.length

The length property contains the number of items in the array.

Examples

// get all the divs in the document
divlist = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
// find the one with target className
for(i = 0; i < divlist.length; i++)
{
  if(divlist[i].className == "my-class")
  {
    // gottcha
  }
}

The example gets a NodeList of all the div (<div>) HTML tags in our document. It then loops using the length attribute (of the NodeList), and tests the className attribute to find the one we want.

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