Note : Both Netscape and Internet Explorer support the Anchors collection (Netscape call it an array). For properties, methods and events that are supported by <A>
elements, see the <A>
topic.
The Anchors collection is an ordered, indexed array, containing a reference to every <A>
element in a document, that has a valid NAME
and/or ID
attribute. (The Links collection contains <A HREF="..." ...>
elements).
Anchor Objects would normally be retrieved by their index in the Anchors collection. I.e.:
document.anchors(1).title
returns the TITLE
attribute of the second anchor in the document (which may not be the second <A>
element in the document).
A string value can be used however, as long as that string is a valid identifier (ID
attribute value) for an element in the document.
E.g.
document.anchors('Anchor1').title
would return the TITLE
attribute of the anchor whose NAME
property is 'Anchor1'.
length
The length
property returns the number of anchors in the collection. Note that the length
count starts at 1, not 0 as the anchors collection index does. Therefore, the length
property may return a value of 5, but to access the 3rd anchor, you'd need to use document.anchors(2).property
item
The item
method retrieves single items, or sub-collections from the anchors collection. It accepts the following arguments:
anchors.item(index, sub-index)
If index
is a number, then the method returns a reference to the anchor at that position in the anchors collections index. I.e. (using the example above)
strTag=document.anchors.item(2).title
would make strTag
be the value of the TITLE
attribute of the documents third anchor. As you can see, this is effectively the long-hand version of using document.anchors(2).property
.
If the index
property is a string value, then the item
method returns a sub-collection, containing a reference to every anchor in the document that has its NAME
or ID
attribute set to the string contained in the index
argument. To retrieve certain element objects from this sub-collection, the sub-index
argument must be used.
© 1995-1998, Stephen Le Hunte