getElementsByClass: what about dom xpath?

June 4th, 2004 by Dylan

Daniel Glazman has added an entry about three ways to emulate getElementsByClass. Of course, there’s another method if your document is xhtml: use xpath like this…



function getElementByClassName(needle) {

var xpathResult = document.evaluate(’//*[@class = "'needle'"]‘, document, null, 0, null);

var outArray = new Array();

var item;
while (item = xpathResult.iterateNext()) outArray[outArray.length] = item;

return outArray;

}

Code updated to address two minor issues brought to my attention by Biju.

2 Responses to “getElementsByClass: what about dom xpath?”

  1. on 25 Sep 2007 at 15:41 pm1 john

    minor rev to work in xul:

    getElementByClassName(needle) {
    var xpathResult = window.document.evaluate(’//*[@class = "' + needle + '"]‘, window.document, null, 0, null);
    var outArray = new Array();
    var item;
    while (item = xpathResult.iterateNext()) outArray[outArray.length] = item;
    return outArray;
    }

  2. on 25 Sep 2007 at 15:44 pm2 john

    i get it - the blog software is “cleaning” the quotes.

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