JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

Name

Anchor — the target of a hypertext link

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 ...