I am not a Javascript expert at all but I'm not sure how to acplish this. I have a link on a page that has a link structured similar to the code below. How can I extract the value of either the title reference or the Link? I figure that innerHTML would need to be used to get Link text but I can't get the element by ID or tag name.

<a href="#" title='titlevalue'>Link</a

I am not a Javascript expert at all but I'm not sure how to acplish this. I have a link on a page that has a link structured similar to the code below. How can I extract the value of either the title reference or the Link? I figure that innerHTML would need to be used to get Link text but I can't get the element by ID or tag name.

<a href="#" title='titlevalue'>Link</a

• javascript
• html

• 1 If you can't target the element using id or tag name, what is it that identifies this link from other links on the page? – JJJ Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 13:14
• You cant get the element by ID o by tag name, can you add a class to it? something to be used as a wat to select it? or do you want to select it by title? – cernunnos Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 13:15
• document.links[2].title will give you the title of the 3rd link on the page – mplungjan Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 13:16

3 Answers 3

You can get the elements with tag name using getElementsByTagName function. This will return array of elements with same tag name. From that array, you can get the element you want and,

using getAttribute function, you can get the value of the specific attribute.

const elements = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
const target = elements[0];

console.log('Href : ' + target.getAttribute('href'));
console.log('Title : ' + target.getAttribute('title'));

<a href="#" title='titlevalue'>Link</a>

You can also use data attributes like this:

<a href="#" data-title='titlevalue'>Link</a>

--> Instead of the title attribute you convert in into a data attribute like this: data-title

And in your javascript:

const link = document.getElementsByTagName('a')[0];
console.log(link.dataset.title);

And this should log: titlevalue

You can read more about data attributes here: https://developer.mozilla/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Howto/Use_data_attributes

You need to add a specific ID to your link. And then you can access it directly and get the valued you need. Here is an example: First, add an id to your link

<a href="#" id="myLink" title='titlevalue'>Link</a>

Then get it with javascript

var title = document.getElementById('myLink').title;
var html = document.getElementById('myLink').innerHTML;

And altogether:

var title = document.getElementById('myLink').title;
var html = document.getElementById('myLink').innerHTML;
console.log("Title: " + title);
console.log("HTML: " + html);

<a href="#" id="myLink" title='titlevalue'>Link</a>