Is there a JavaScript method to get an element by attribute, like a function such as doc.findElementByAttribute("myAttribute", "aValue")?
Hey! From my experience, while JavaScript doesn’t have a built-in method named something like findElementByAttribute, you can easily get an element by attribute using document.querySelector. It’s really simple — just use a CSS attribute selector, like this:
document.querySelector('[myAttribute="aValue"]');
This will return the first element it finds with that attribute and value, or null if none exists. So if you’re looking for a straightforward way to do javascript get element by attribute, this is your go-to.
Adding to that, I’ve found querySelector to be incredibly handy for javascript get element by attribute tasks. Just to expand a bit: since it’s basically CSS selectors under the hood, you can get creative — for example, find elements where an attribute starts with or contains a certain value using selectors like [myAttribute^="start"] or [myAttribute*="part"].
But if you only want one element matching exactly [myAttribute="aValue"], document.querySelector is the cleanest and most efficient choice. Also, it’s supported in all modern browsers, so you’re good to go without any polyfills.
Building further on those great points, I’d say if you want to find all elements matching a specific attribute and value, not just the first one, you should use document.querySelectorAll. For example:
document.querySelectorAll('[myAttribute="aValue"]');
This returns a NodeList of all elements matching that attribute-value pair. You can then loop over it to manipulate each element as needed. So whether you need just one element or many, javascript get element by attribute is nicely covered with these two methods, making your DOM queries clean and efficient without custom functions.