Question

I am trying to go through an element and get all the attributes of that element to output them, for example an tag may have 3 or more attributes, unknown to me and I need to get the names and values of these attributes. I was thinking something along the lines of:

$(this).attr().each(function(index, element) {
    var name = $(this).name;
    var value = $(this).value;
    //Do something with name and value...
});

Could anyone tell me if this is even possible, and if so what the correct syntax would be?

Answer 1

The attributes property contains them all:

$(this).each(function() {
  $.each(this.attributes, function() {
    // this.attributes is not a plain object, but an array
    // of attribute nodes, which contain both the name and value
    if(this.specified) {
      console.log(this.name, this.value);
    }
  });
});

---

What you can also do is extending .attr so that you can call it like .attr() to get a plain object of all attributes:

(function(old) {
  $.fn.attr = function() {
    if(arguments.length === 0) {
      if(this.length === 0) {
        return null;
      }

      var obj = {};
      $.each(this[0].attributes, function() {
        if(this.specified) {
          obj[this.name] = this.value;
        }
      });
      return obj;
    }

    return old.apply(this, arguments);
  };
})($.fn.attr);

Usage:

var $div = $("<div data-a='1' id='b'>");
$div.attr();  // { "data-a": "1", "id": "b" }