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Asked: 2026-05-16T01:22:09+00:00

Requirement : Return the element object. Problem : Using the code below, I expected

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Requirement: Return the element object.
Problem: Using the code below, I expected the links to return [object], but they actually return the string in the href attribute (or in the case of the first link, the Window object).

(The HTML below has been tested in FireFox 3.6.8 and Internet Explorer 7 (7.0.6002.18005) with the same results.)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
      <title>Anchor onclick tests</title>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    </head>
    <body>
        <div>
            <a href="javascript:alert(this);" title="">&lt;a href=&quot;javascript:alert(this);&quot;&gt;...&lt;a/&gt;</a> - Returns: [object Window]<br />
            <a href="#" onclick="alert(this);" title="">&lt;a href=&quot;#&quot; onclick=&quot;alert(this);&quot;&gt;...&lt;a/&gt;</a> - Returns: Full URI<br />
            <a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="alert(this);" title="">&lt;a href=&quot;javascript:void(0);&quot; onclick=&quot;alert(this);&quot;&gt;...&lt;a/&gt;</a> - Returns: javascript:void(0);
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

Adding .tagname to the this keyword returns undefined for the first link but correctly identifies the second and third as A. Likewise, requesting .href returns undefined for the first link but correctly outputs the href (full URI in the case of ‘#’).

Does anyone know why, and how I can get a hold on the A object itself?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As you said, accessing a property in the second and third link works. That means that this is indeed the A DOM element but when it is converted to a string (which is what happens when you want to alert it) it is converted to the URL.

    So you already have your object 😉

    Same happens when you do alert(document.location). It is actually an object but when converted to a string, it prints the current location.

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