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How do you access a custom XHTML attribute with JavaScript?

Answer 1

+4 A:

Normally speaking you can access it directly, i.e. element.attribute but the namespace slightly complicates this to:

element.getAttribute("namespace:attribute") //the nuclear x-browser option

so just to be really really clear, that'll be something like:

document.getElementById('myid').getAttribute('cus:att')

annakata 2009-03-26 09:07:36

It works, but he has to get to the element before, which doesn't have an ID, nor class, nor name. Using DOM element as "global" isn't a good practice and you might get burned.

Bogdan Constantinescu 2009-03-26 09:19:40

My problem wasn't getting the element but I will add the id to the question.

tpower 2009-03-26 09:22:50

@Bogdan - I'm hardly suggesting he does any global anything, I'm just providing the general form under the (correct) assumption that the OP was capable of selecting the element already

annakata 2009-03-26 09:30:31

@annakata Sure, I didn't say you were wrong, but right about now the answer is very good. +1 :)

Bogdan Constantinescu 2009-03-26 09:39:33

I will accept this answer but there is one thing bugging me. To do this I need to know what alias the author chose for the namespace.

tpower 2009-03-26 09:47:42

you can of course do some nasty trawling like "var e = document.getElementById("foo"); for(var x in e.attributes) { if(x.match(/att$/)) { alert(e.getAttribute(x)); } }", and it's likely jQuery et al have abstractions which wrap this for you

annakata 2009-03-26 10:05:22

Answer 2

+1 A:

There is a special version of the getAttribute method specifically designed for accessing namespaced attributes: getAttributeNS. With your example XHTML, the following JavaScript code:

document.getElementById("myid").getAttributeNS("http://mycompany.com/customnamespace", "att");

...would return "myvalue".

You can read more about the getAttributeNS method here.

Steve

Steve Harrison 2009-03-26 11:05:16

getAttributeNS is not supported by IE

annakata 2009-03-26 12:20:35

Also won't work when the document is XHTML-served-as-HTML. It takes a proper XML parser to support namespaces.

bobince 2009-03-26 16:42:26

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How do you access a custom XHTML attribute with JavaScript?

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