A couple of useful ‘vanilla’ Javascript methods that are a little ignored although they have been around since DOM2.

The hasAttributes() Method

This checks to see if an element has any attributes and a boolean value – true for yes indeedy and false for nope soz is returned.

Take this HTML snippet:

<p class="someClass">We are classy</p>
<p class="someClass">We are classy</p>
<p>I lack class</p>
<p class="someClass">We are classy</p>

If we need to identify the <p> without a class then we could use the hasAttributes() method as follows:

document.getElementById('findClassless').addEventListener('click', function(){
	var noItems = document.getElementsByTagName('p').length;
	for(var i=0; i<noItems ; i++){
        if(!document.getElementsByTagName('p').item(i).hasAttributes()){
		document.getElementsByTagName('p').item(i).setAttribute('class', 'someClass');
		document.getElementsByTagName('p').item(i).innerHTML = "Now I'm classy!";
	};
    }
});

Line 4 checks each <p> to see if it has any attributes. If the <p> does not have any attributes then we will add an attribute with setAttribute.

View The Demo

The hasAttribute() Method

The hasAttribute() can be used to look for one specific attribute. Therefore our example above could be amended to use hasAttribute('class').

document.getElementById('findClassless').addEventListener('click', function(){
	var noItems = document.getElementsByTagName('p').length;
	for(var i=0; i<noItems ; i++){
        if(!document.getElementsByTagName('p').item(i).hasAttribute('class')){
		document.getElementsByTagName('p').item(i).setAttribute('class', 'someClass');
		document.getElementsByTagName('p').item(i).innerHTML = "Now I'm classy!";
	};
    }
});

View The Demo

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