How to change a HTML tag using JavaScript

Question

Consider the following code:

var element = document.CreateElement(\"div\");
element.toString(); // [object HTMLDivElement]

var element = document.CreateElement(         


        

Answer 1

An element's tagName is readonly (immutable) no matter what the element is. You cannot change an element's tag name without some rebuilding of the DOM. That is it's not possible to change an existing element, but it's not that difficult to create a new element and append the existing element's children.

var node = document.querySelector('div'),
    newNode = document.createElement('span'),
    parent = node.parentNode,
    children = node.childNodes;

Array.prototype.forEach.call(children, function (elem) {
    newNode.appendChild(elem);
});
parent.replaceChild(newNode, node);

http://jsfiddle.net/ExplosionPIlls/wwhKp/