13 JavaScript Methods Useful For DOM Manipulation

Intro

DOM or the Document Object Model is the root of all objects on the web page. It represents the structure of a document and connects the page to the programming languages. It is structured as a logical tree. Each branch ends in a node and each node contains child nodes, objects. The DOM API is quite large and in this article, we will cover only the ones I find most useful.

document.querySelector / document.querySelectorAll

The method document.querySelector returns the first element within the document that matches the given selector(s).

The method document.querySelectorAll returns a list of nodes representing a list of the document's elements matched by the given selector(s).

// returns the first list
const list = document.querySelector('ul');
// returns all div elements with class intro or warning
const elements = document.querySelectorAll('div.info, div.warning');

document.createElement

This method creates a new HTMLElement by the given tag name. The return value is the newly created element.

Node.appendChild

The Node.appendChild() method adds a node to the end of the list of children of a given parent node. Note that if the given child is a reference of an existing node in the document, it will be moved to the new position.

Let's see these two in action:

let list = document.createElement('ul'); // creates a new list
['Paris', 'London', 'New York'].forEach(city => {
    let listItem = document.createElement('li');
    listItem.innerText = city;
    list.appendChild(listItem);
});
document.body.appendChild(list);

Node.insertBefore

This method inserts a given node before the child reference node within a specified parent node (and returns the inserted node). Quick pseudo code would be something like this:

1. Paris
2. London
3. New York

↓

Node.insertBefore(San Francisco, Paris)

↓

1. San Francisco
2. Paris
3. London
4. New York

let list = document.querySelector('ul');
let firstCity = list.querySelector('ul > li'); // here we could use list.firstChild, but the purpose of this article is to show DOM API methods
let newCity = document.createElement('li');
newCity.textContent = 'San Francisco';
list.insertBefore(newCity, firstCity);

Node.removeChild

The Node.removeChild method removes a child node from the DOM and returns the removed node. Note that the returned node is no longer part of the DOM but still exists in memory. If not handled properly it can cause memory leaks.

let list = document.querySelector('ul');
let firstItem = list.querySelector('li');
let removedItem = list.removeChild(firstItem);

Node.replaceChild

This method replaces a child node within the parent node (and returns the replaced, old child). Note that this method, if not handled properly, can cause memory leaks just like Node.removeChild.

let list = document.querySelector('ul');
let oldItem = list.querySelector('li');
let newItem = document.createElement('li');
newItem.innerHTML = 'Las Vegas';
let replacedItem = list.replaceChild(newItem, oldItem);

Node.cloneNode

This method creates a duplicate of the given node on which this method was invoked. Useful when you need to create a new element that needs to be the same as an existing element on the page. It accepts an optional boolean parameter, a flag that indicates whether the child nodes should be cloned or not.

let list = document.querySelector('ul');
let clone = list.cloneNode();

Element.getAttribute / Element.setAttribute

The Element.getAttribute method returns the value of a given attribute on the element and vice versa, the Element.setAttribute sets the value of an attribute on the given element.

let list = document.querySelector('ul');
list.setAttribute('id', 'my-list');
let id = list.getAttribute('id');
console.log(id); // outputs my-list

Element.hasAttribute / Element.removeAttribute

The Element.hasAttribute method checks whether the given element has the specified attribute or not. The return value is boolean. By invoking the method Element.removeAttribute we can remove the attribute with the given name from the element.

let list = document.querySelector('ul');
if (list.hasAttribute('id')) {
    console.log('list has an id');
    list.removeAttribute('id');
};

Element.insertAdjacentHTML

This method parses the specified text as HTML and inserts the resulting nodes into the DOM tree at a given position. It will not corrupt the existing nodes within the element it inserts the new HTML. The position can be one of the following strings:

1. beforebegin
2. afterbegin
3. beforeend
4. afterend

<!-- beforebegin -->
<div>
  <!-- afterbegin -->
  <p>Hello World</p>
  <!-- beforeend -->
</div>
<!-- afterend -->

Example:

var list = document.querySelector('ul');
list.insertAdjacentHTML('afterbegin', '<li id="first-item">First</li>');

Note that when using this method we need to properly sanitize the given HTML.

Originally posted on my-blog

Conclusion And Further Reading

I hope you find this list useful and that will help you understand the DOM. Handling the DOM tree properly is extremely important, and not doing it correctly might bring you some serious consequences. Make sure that you always do a memory cleanup and sanitize the HTML/XML strings properly.

For further reading check out the official w3c page.