Question

I’m trying to find the form element type (i.e. textarea, input etc.) by only having its ‘name’ attribute. Is there any way of achieving this with jQuery?

Answer 1

Get the element by its name attribute:

$('[name="someName"]')

Then get the first element with [0]:

$('[name="someName"]')[0]

Then get the tag name with nodeName and normalise it with toLowerCase:

$('[name="someName"]')[0].nodeName.toLowerCase()

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In jQuery 1.6, you can do this slightly more beautifully (if a little more slowly) by using prop:

$('[name="someName"]').prop('nodeName');

I don’t think this will be normalised, so you’ll need to do so yourself.