How to clone element with given class name

Question

I am using getElementById when I need to clone the div element.

Code:

printHTML( document.getElementById(\"div_name\").cloneNode(true));         


        

Answer 1

getElementsByClassName gets a nodelist, or an array-like object containing elements if you will, as there can be more than one element with the same class.

getElementsByClassName does this even if only one element matches the class.
You can generally recognize methods like that be the s in getElements, which means it gets multiple elements, i.e. a nodeList.

getElementById only gets one element as ID's are unique.

To get the first element in the nodelist, use bracket notation, like so:

document.getElementsByClassName("div_name")[0].cloneNode(true);

or one could use querySelector, which gets the first matching element only

document.querySelector(".div_name").cloneNode(true);

The jQuery solution would be:

$('.div_name').clone(true);

and to iterate over elements with a certain classname you'd use a loop

var elems = document.getElementsByClassName("div_name");

for ( var i=0; i