Question

Probably a dumb question, but is there a way in JavaScript to find out a form element’s type (text, checkbox, etc.) from a form element after finding it by name or id? Either in plain old JavaScript or using jQuery-style syntax or methods would be ideal.

Example:

<input type="text" name="my_text_input" id="my_text_input"/>
<script>var element = document.getElementById('my_text_input'); // now how to get the element type?</script>

I’m not looking for alternatives, this is exactly what I want to do. I’m making a sort of screen scraper that needs to collect this information.

Answer 1

The type property will give you this…

document.getElementById('my_text_input').type;

However, you have also tagged the question with jQuery, so you could use…

$('#my_text_input').attr('type');

jsFiddle.