Copyright © 2013 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio, Beihang), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark and document use rules apply.
Selectors, which are widely used in CSS, are patterns that match against
elements in a tree structure [SELECTORS4][CSS21]. The Selectors API
specification defines methods for retrieving Element
nodes from the DOM by matching against a group of
selectors, and for testing if a given element matches a particular
selector. It is often desirable to perform DOM operations on a specific
set of elements in a document. These methods simplify the process of
acquiring and testing specific elements, especially compared with the more
verbose techniques defined and used in the past.
Document Status Update 2020-04-16: This specification has been superseded by DOM Review Draft — Published 18 June 2019. For purposes of the W3C Patent Policy this Superseded Recommendation has the same status as an active Recommendation; it retains licensing commitments and remains available as a reference for old implementations. DOM Review Draft — Published 18 June 2019 is recommended for new adoption.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
This is the 17 October 2013 Working Group Note of "Selectors API Level 2". The W3C Membership and other interested parties are invited to review the document and send comments to www-dom@w3.org (public archive) with [selectors-api] in the subject.
This document was developed by the Web Applications Working Group. This Working Group will not advance this Working Group Note to Recommendation Status.
Note: the Web Applications Working Group is no longer actively working on this specification. However, its features will be included in the DOM4 specification that is being developed by the HTML Working Group. Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways. Vendors interested in implementing this specification should join the aforementioned mailing list and take part in the discussions.
Publication as a Working Group Note does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
This section is non-normative.
This specification provides methods for selecting and testing elements
based on whether or not they match a given selector. With these methods,
it is easier to match a set of Element
nodes based on specific criteria, than having to subsequently filter the
result of calling other methods like getElementsByTagName()
.
This section is non-normative.
Some ECMAScript [ECMA-262-5.1] examples:
This is an example table written in HTML5.
<table id="score"> <thead> <tr> <th>Test <th>Result <tfoot> <tr> <th>Average <td>82% <tbody> <tr> <td>A <td>87% <tr> <td>B <td>78% <tr> <td>C <td>81% </table>
In order to obtain the cells containing the results in the table, which
might be done, for example, to plot the values on a graph, there are at
least two approaches that may be taken. Using only the APIs from DOM
Level 2, it requires a script like the following that iterates through
each tr
within each tbody
in the
table
to find the second cell of each row.
var table = document.getElementById("score"); var groups = table.tBodies; var rows = null; var cells = []; for (var i = 0; i < groups.length; i++) { rows = groups[i].rows; for (var j = 0; j < rows.length; j++) { cells.push(rows[j].cells[1]); } }
Alternatively, using the querySelectorAll()
method, that
script becomes much more concise.
var cells = document.querySelectorAll("#score>tbody>tr>td:nth-of-type(2)");
Note that the script operates on the DOM and works independently from the syntax used to create the document. Thus this script will also work correctly for an equivalent table created from well-formed XHTML instead of HTML, or dynamically created and inserted into a document using DOM APIs.
All diagrams, examples and notes in this specification are non-normative, as are all sections explicitly marked non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
The key words must, must not, should, may and recommended in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
The following conformance classes are defined (and considered) by this specification:
The terminology used in this specification is that from Selectors [SELECTORS4], including:
The following features are defined in the DOM4 specification [DOM]:
Document
interface.
DocumentFragment
interface.
Element
interface.
NodeList
interface.
Conformance requirements phrased as algorithms or specific steps may be implemented in any manner, so long as the end result is equivalent.
The IDL used in this specification uses the syntax defined in Web IDL [DOM-BINDINGS].
The construction "Foo
object", where Foo
is
actually an interface, is sometimes used instead of the more accurate
"object implementing the Foo
interface".
This section is non-normative.
Some implementations might have different levels of support for Selectors. If some implementations lack support for some selectors, then the use of such selectors will result in those implementations failing to return the expected results. Authors are advised to check for the DOM Exceptions thrown by these APIs and provide a fallback for graceful degradation.
This section is non-normative.
Extensions of the APIs defined in this specification are strongly discouraged. Implementors, Working Groups and other interested parties should discuss extensions on a relevant public forum, such as public-webapps@w3.org.
It is expected that implementing this specification introduces no new security risks for users.
If, at any time, the implementation detects a situation which would violate security policies, the implementation may abort and raise a security exception. If any other error condition occurs which is not covered directly by this or any other relevant specification, the implementation may abort and raise an appropriate, language-binding-specific or implementation-specific exception.
History theft is a potential privacy issue because the
:visited
pseudo-class in Selectors [SELECTORS4] allows authors to
query which links have been visited.
This is not a new problem, as it can already be exploited
using existing CSS and DOM APIs, such as getComputedStyle()
[DOM-LEVEL-2-STYLE].
In this example, vlinks will acquire a list of links that the user has visited. The author can then obtain the URIs and potentially exploit this knowledge.
var vlinks = document.querySelectorAll(":visited"); for (var i = 0; i < vlinks.length; i++) { doSomethingEvil(vlinks[i].href); }
As defined in Selectors ([SELECTORS4], section 7.2), user agents may treat all links as unvisited links. It is recommended that implementations behave consistently with other uses of Selectors supported by the user agent.
The term first used in the definitions of the
methods defined in this specification means first in tree order. The term
subtrees refers to the set of elements that are
descendants of the specified context object.
The term matching Element
node refers to an Element
node
that matches the selector string
(selectors) that was passed to the method, according to the
rules for matching elements defined in Selectors [SELECTORS4].
partial interface Document { Element? querySelector(DOMString selectors); NodeList querySelectorAll(DOMString selectors); Element? find(DOMString selectors, optional (Element or sequence<Node>)? refNodes); NodeList findAll(DOMString selectors, optional (Element or sequence<Node>)? refNodes); }; partial interface DocumentFragment { Element? querySelector(DOMString selectors); NodeList querySelectorAll(DOMString selectors); Element? find(DOMString selectors, optional (Element or sequence<Node>)? refNodes); NodeList findAll(DOMString selectors, optional (Element or sequence<Node>)? refNodes); }; partial interface Element { Element? querySelector(DOMString selectors); NodeList querySelectorAll(DOMString selectors); Element? find(DOMString selectors); NodeList findAll(DOMString selectors); boolean matches(DOMString selectors, optional (Element or sequence<Node>)? refNodes); };
The selectors argument for the querySelector
and querySelectorAll
methods accepts
a selector string.
The querySelector()
methods on the Document
, DocumentFragment
, and Element
interfaces must
return the first matching Element
node within the subtrees of the context
object. If there is no matching Element
, the method must return null
.
The querySelectorAll()
methods on
the Document
, DocumentFragment
, and Element
interfaces must
return a NodeList
containing all of
the matching Element
nodes within the
subtrees of the context
object, in tree
order. If there are no matching nodes, the method must return an empty NodeList
.
When either querySelector
or
querySelectorAll
are invoked,
the implementation must follow these steps:
Let reference nodes be the result of running the algorithm to determine contextual reference nodes.
Let parsed selector be the result of running the algorithm to parse a selector with selectors, relative and reference nodes as the input.
The implementation must then run the algorithm to evaluate a selector against element nodes in the specified tree or subtrees using parsed selector as the selector and reference nodes as the contextual reference element set, as needed to return the required result for the invoked method.
The NodeList
object returned by the
querySelectorAll()
method must be static
([DOM], section 8).
The selectors argument for the find
and findAll
methods accepts a relative selector string.
The optional refNodes argument specifies zero or more nodes to be included in the contextual reference element set.
The find()
methods on the Document
, DocumentFragment
, and Element
interfaces must
return the first matching Element
node from the tree within which the context object is located. If there is no
matching Element
, the method must return null
.
The findAll()
methods
on the Document
,
DocumentFragment
, and Element
interfaces must
return a ?
[collection] containing all of the matching Element
nodes from the tree within which the context object is located. If there is no
matching Element
, the method must return an empty ?
[collection].
When either find
or findAll
is invoked, the implementation
must follow these steps:
Let reference nodes be the result of running the algorithm to determine contextual reference nodes using refNodes as the input, if provided.
Let the scope flag be true.
Let parsed selector be the result of running the algorithm to parse a relative selector with selectors, relative and reference nodes as the input.
The implementation must then run the algorithm to evaluate a selector against element nodes in the specified tree using parsed selector as the selector and reference nodes as the contextual reference element set, as needed to return the required result for the invoked method.
The selectors argument for the matches
method accepts a relative selector string.
The optional refNodes argument specifies zero or more nodes to be included in the contextual reference element set.
The matches()
method on
the Element
interface must return true if the context
object is a matching
Element
node. Otherwise, the method must return false.
When the method is invoked, the implementation must follow these steps:
Let reference nodes be the result of running the algorithm to determine contextual reference nodes using refNodes as the input, if provided.
Let the scope flag be false.
Let parsed selector be the result of running the algorithm to parse a relative selector with selectors and reference nodes as the input.
The implementation must then run the algorithm to evaluate a selector against the context object using parsed selector as the selector and reference nodes as the contextual reference element set.
A selector string is a list of one or more
complex
selectors ([SELECTORS4], section 3.1) that
may be surrounded by whitespace and matches the
dom_selectors_group
production.
A relative selector string is a
list of one or more relative selectors that matches the
dom_relative_selectors_group
production.
A relative selector is a complex selector
([SELECTORS4], section 3.1) that
may be preceded by a combinator, and matches the
dom_relative_selector
production. Implementations must not allow a relative
selector to begin with a descendant combinator (a space).
dom_selectors_group : S* [ selectors_group ] S* ; dom_relative_selectors_group : S* [ dom_relative_selector [ COMMA S* dom_relative_selector ]* ] S* ; dom_relative_selector /* Note that this cannot begin with a descendant combinator */ : [ combinator ]? selector ;
The productions for selectors_group
,
combinator
and selector
are defined in Selectors
4 ([SELECTORS4], section 16.1).
These groups of selectors should not use namespace prefixes that need to be resolved.
Implementers are advised that if null
or
undefined
are passed as the value of the selectors
parameter, they are to be handled as defined in WebIDL [DOM-BINDINGS]. Authors are
advised to avoid passing these values.
Authors are advised that while the use of pseudo-elements in selectors is permitted, they will not match any elements in the document, and thus would not result in any elements being returned. Therefore, authors are advised to avoid the use of pseudo-elements in selectors that are passed to the methods defined in this specification.
The scope flag is set to "true" when finding
elements. It is set to "false" when matching elements. This flag is used
to determine whether :scope
is always included when there are
reference nodes, or only when required due to a selector beginning with a
combinator.
The steps to parse a selector are as follows:
Let selectors be the selector string or relative selector string input to this algorithm.
Let reference nodes be the reference nodes input to this algorithm.
Let result be the group of selectors returned as a result
of parsing the selectors according to the grammar for
dom_selectors_group
defined above.
If result is invalid ([SELECTORS4], section 3.8), throw a
SyntaxError
exception ([DOM], section 3.1) and abort this
algorithm.
The steps to parse a relative selector are as follows:
If selectors matches the grammar for
dom_relative_selectors_group
, let selectors
group be the group of selectors returned as a result of parsing
the selectors according to the grammar for
dom_relative_selectors_group
defined above.
Otherwise, throw a
SyntaxError
exception ([DOM], section 3.1) and abort this
algorithm.
Let result be an initially empty group of selectors.
For each relative selector in selectors group:
If the relative selector
begins with a combinator, then prepend the simple selector
":scope
" to the relative selector.
Otherwise, if the reference nodes is an empty collection, do nothing.
Otherwise, if any compound selector within relative selector includes a
functional pseudo-class that accepts a selector as its parameter, and
which contains the ":scope
" pseudo-class anywhere within
it, then do nothing.
Otherwise, if the relative selector includes :scope within any compound or simple selector, then do nothing.
Otherwise, if the scope flag is false, then do nothing.
Otherwise, prepend the simple selector ":scope
" and a
descendant combinator ('
') to the relative selector.
Add relative selector to result.
The steps to evaluate a selector are as follows:
Let element be the element being evaluated.
Let selector group be the selector input into this algotihm.
Let reference nodes be the reference nodes input into this algorithm.
For the purpose of evaluating the :scope
pseudo-class,
the contextual reference
element set contains all Element
nodes contained within reference nodes.
If any selector in selector group matches element, return true. Otherwise, return false.
Selectors are evaluated against a given element in the context of the entire DOM tree in which the element is located.
If the user agent also supports some level of CSS, the implementation should support the same set of selectors in both these APIs and CSS.
The steps to determine contextual reference nodes are as follows:
Let input be the value that is being processed, if provided.
Let result be an initially empty collection of Element
nodes.
If the input was provided, then:
If input is an Element
node, then append that Element
to the result
collection.
If input is a sequence of Node
objects, then
iterate through the sequence and append each Element
node contained within it to
the result collection.
If input is null
, then do nothing.
This leaves the result collection empty.
Otherwise, if input was omitted, then:
If the context object is an Element
node, then append that Element
to the result
collection.
Return result.
The result may still be an empty collection at the end of that process.
If the refNodes parameter was passed a sequence containing
objects other than Node
objects, then a
TypeError
will be thrown [DOM-BINDINGS].
If the group of selectors include namespace prefixes that need to be resolved, the
implementation must throw a
SyntaxError
exception ([DOM], section 3.1).
This specification does not provide support for resolving arbitrary namespace prefixes. However, support for a namespace prefix resolution mechanism may be considered for inclusion in a future version of this specification.
A namespace prefix needs to be resolved if the
namespace component is neither empty (e.g. |div
),
representing the null namespace, or an asterisk (e.g. *|div
),
representing any namespace. Since the asterisk or empty namespace prefix
do not need to be resolved, implementations that support the namespace
syntax in Selectors must support these. [SELECTORS4]
Add more examples illustrating the use of the reference node and :scope selector, as well as the find() and matches() methods.
The following examples make use of this sample XHTML document.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Selectors API Example</title> </head> <body> <div id="foo"> <p class="warning">This is a sample warning</p> <p class="error">This is a sample error</p> </div> <div id="bar"> <p>...</p> </div> </body> </html>
The methods accept a group of selectors (comma separated) as the
argument. The following example would select all p
elements
in the document that have a class of either "error
" or
"warning
".
var alerts = document.querySelectorAll("p.warning, p.error");
The querySelector()
methods
also accept a group of selectors and they will return the first element
(if any) that matches any of the selectors in the group.
var x = document.querySelector("#foo, #bar");
x would contain the first element in the document with an ID
of either foo
or bar
, or null
if
there is no such element. In the sample document above, it would select
the div
element with the ID of foo
because it
is first in tree order. The order of the selectors used in
the parameter has no effect and would have the same result if the order
were reversed, as in:
var x = document.querySelector("#bar, #foo");
The methods can also be invoked on elements. In the following example, assume the event handler is registered on an element, and thus the method is invoked on the target element of the event.
function handle(evt) { var x = evt.target.querySelector("span"); ... // Do something with x }
Even though the method is invoked on an element, selectors are still
evaluated in the context of the entire document. In the following
example, the method will still match the div
element's child
p
element, even though the body
element is not
a descendant of the div
element itself.
var div = document.getElementById("bar"); var p = div.querySelector("body p");
Given this sample fragment that contains a list as a navigation menu:
<ul class="nav"> <li><a href="/">Home</a></li> <li><a href="/products">Products</a></li> <li><a href="/about">About</a></li> </ul>
The following example selects all the li
elements and
demonstrates how to iterate through the collection in a NodeList
.
var lis = document.querySelectorAll("ul.nav>li"); for (var i = 0; i < lis.length; i++) { process(lis.item(i)); }
In ECMAScript, the language binding also allows NodeList
s to be addressed using the
array notation, so that loop could be rewritten like this:
for (var i = 0; i < lis.length; i++) { process(lis[i]); }
Since the NodeList
objects
returned by these methods are not live, changes to the DOM do not affect
the content of the list. Consider the process()
function
called in the previous examples is defined as follows:
function process(elmt) { elmt.parentNode.removeChild(elmt); }
This would cause each selected element to be removed from the DOM, but
each element will remain in the NodeList
. If the list were a live NodeList
, removing an item from the DOM
would also remove the element from the list and adjust the indexes of
subsequent elements. That would have adverse effects upon the loop
because not all selected elements would be processed.
In documents comprising elements from multiple namespaces, it's
possible that some elements from different namespaces share the same
local name. Since this API does not natively support a namespace
resolution mechanism for selectors, obtaining a list of such elements
from a specific namespace, excluding all others, requires additional
processing to filter the result. The following example illustrates a
document containing video
elements from both the SVG and
XHTML namespaces.
<svg id="svg1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <video id="svgvideo1" xlink:href="myvideo.ogg" width="320" height="240"/> <foreignObject width="100" height="100"> <video id="htmlvideo1" src="myvideo.ogg" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">No video1</video> </foreignObject> </svg>
The following script demonstrates how to first select the
video
elements and then filter out the unwanted elements
based on their namespace.
var elms = document.querySelectorAll("svg video"); var result = new Array(); var svgns = "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" for(var i = 0; i < elms.length; i++) { if(elms[i].namespaceURI == svgns) { result.push(elms[i]); } }
The editors would like to thank to the following people who have contributed to this specification (ordered on first name):
Adam van den Hoven, Alan Gresley, Alex Russell, Arthur Barstow, Aryeh Gregor, Björn Höhrmann, Boris Zbarsky, Cameron McCormack, Charles McCathieNevile, Chris Wilson, Christophe Jolif, Daniel Glazman, Daniel Schierbeck, Dave Massy, David "liorean" Andersson, David Greenspan, David Håsäther, Dean Jackson, Doug Schepers, Erik Dahlström, Francois Remy, Hallvord R. M. Steen, Henri Sivonen, Ian Hickson, Ivan Enderlin, Jean-Yves Bitterlich, Jim Ley, João Eiras, John Resig, Jon Ferraiolo, Jonas Sicking, Jorgen Horstink, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu, Karl Dubost, Kartikaya Gupta, L. David Baron, Maciej Stachowiak, Magnus Kristiansen, Marat Tanalin, Martijn, Masataka Yakura, Mihai Sucan, Mohamed Zergaoui, Nicholas C. Zakas, Nicolas Mendoza, Norbert Lindenberg, Philip Taylor, Robert Sayre, Robin Berjon, Sander, Sergey Ilinsky, Simon Pieters, Steven Pemberton, Stewart Brodie Tab Atkins Jr., Tarquin Wilton-Jones, Travis Leithead, and William J. Edney
Special thanks to Anne van Kesteren, the original editor of Selectors API Level 1.
Thanks to all those who have helped to improve this specification by sending suggestions and corrections.