Retrieve form's "name" attribute in Javascript whereas an input exists with name "name"

javascript forms dom attributes

12,879

I think this oughtta work

document.getElementById("hello").attributes["name"].value;

tests ok in IE8, which is all I have. you might have to do some browser checking and pick your approach as needed.

edits: actually, your example works fine for me in IE8 too. but not ie7.

12,879

Author by

Frédéric Camblor

Updated on June 05, 2022

Comments

Frédéric Camblor almost 2 years
I have something like this HTML structure :
```
   <form name="myvalue" id="hello">
      <input type="text" name="name" />
    </form>
```
I'd like to retrieve the form's name attribute in Javascript, with a cross browser solution.

Obviously,
```
document.getElementById("hello").name 
```
won't work because it will return the corresponding input object.

Under chrome, following code works, but I didn't succeeded to find the equivalent for Internet Explorer 8
```
document.getElementById("hello").getAttribute("name")
```
Thanks in advance !

Frédéric
- Michael Mao over 13 years
  
  So, the question is, which name attribute you are trying to get? The one for the form? Or the one for the text input?
- Frédéric Camblor over 13 years
  
  Purpose it to retrieve the "myvalue" form's name attribute value
- Ruan Mendes over 13 years
  
  Interesting, getAttribute works for me across all browsers. I tried document.getElementById('tsf').getAttribute('name') on google.com and it returned the form's name (f). I thought it may be related to quirks/standards mode, but it worked with all combinations of browser and document modes. Can you post the full html, including the doctype definition?
- Frédéric Camblor over 13 years
  
  What is your OS ? (I'm under windows 7)
- Ruan Mendes over 13 years
  
  I'm using XP, and I just tired it under my Windows 7 and it was fine. Did you try running the line I gave you from google.com. I'm mentioning this because I ran across problems with using the attributes collection and set/getAttribute worked for me without the need for a wrapper function to normalize across browsers.
Dagg Nabbit over 13 years

ooh neat, didn't realize attributes had named properties.
Frédéric Camblor over 13 years

I'll try this on IE 7 though ;-)