Availability

JavaScript 1.2

Inherits from/Overrides

Inherits from HTMLElement

Synopsis

document.anchors[i] 
document.anchors.length

Properties

Anchor inherits properties from HTMLElement and defines or overrides the following:

name

Contains the name of an Anchor object. The value of this property is initially set by the name attribute of the <a> tag.

text [Netscape 4]

This property specifies the plain text, if any, between the <a> and </a> tags of an anchor. Note that this property works correctly only if there are no intervening HTML tags between the <a> and </a> tags. If there are other HTML tags, the text property may contain only a portion of the anchor text.

HTMLElement.innerText provides the IE 4 equivalent of this Netscape-specific property.

HTML Syntax

An Anchor object is created by any standard HTML <a> tag that contains a name attribute:

<a
  name="name"  // Links may refer to this anchor by this name
>
text
</a>

Description

An anchor is a named location within an HTML document. Anchors are created with an <a> tag that has a name attribute specified. The Document object has an anchors[] array property that contains Anchor objects that represent each of the anchors in the document. This anchors[] array has existed since JavaScript 1.0, but the Anchor object was not implemented until JavaScript 1.2. Therefore, the elements of anchors[] were null until JavaScript 1.2.

Note that the <a> tag used to create anchors is also used to create hypertext links. Although hypertext links are often called anchors in HTML parlance, they are represented in JavaScript with the Link object, not with the Anchor object. In the DOM reference section of this book, however, both anchors and links are documented under HTMLAnchorElement.

See Also

anchors[] property of the Document object, Link; HTMLAnchorElement in the DOM reference section