IE 6 getElementsById() and prototype $() function return dom elements by name

Scott Meves — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:07:29 +0000

I can’t believe I had not run into this yet, but today I had a page that had an element (an anchor) with a name attribute (“floorplans”), and further down the page a div with that id (“floorplans”). When I tried to dynamically load content into my div using $(‘floorplans’), things were getting all out of control on IE 6. Turns out IE6’s document.getElementById returns the first element whose id OR name matches the string, and of course Prototype’s $() function relies on the browser’s own getElementById(). Lesson learned!

Get value of radio button group using prototype

Scott Meves — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:50:06 +0000

If you want to get the value of the selected element of a radio group, prototype makes this easy. There is more than one way to do it. I’ll update this post as better methods surface. Check out code after the jump.

$$('input:checked[type="radio"][name="my_radio_group"]').pluck('value');

What this does is use css selectors to pull out an input element with the attribute “checked” of type “radio” and with the name”my_radio_group”. The $$ function returns an array, although in this case it is only one element long. “pluck” returns the given attribute (in our case we want the value attribute) for the elements in the array.

Stereo Interactive & Design » prototype

IE 6 getElementsById() and prototype $() function return dom elements by *name*

Get value of radio button group using prototype

IE 6 getElementsById() and prototype $() function return dom elements by name