Baseline Widely available
The read-only parentElement
property of Node
interface returns the DOM node's parent Element
, or null
if the node either has no parent, or its parent isn't a DOM Element
. Node.parentNode
on the other hand returns any kind of parent, regardless of its type.
An Element
that is the parent element of the current node, or null
if there isn't one.
This example sets the parent of node
to have a red text color.
if (node.parentElement) {
node.parentElement.style.color = "red";
}
parentElement being null
parentElement
can be null
if the node has no parent (for example, because it isn't attached to a tree) or its parent is not an Element
. On the other hand, Node.parentNode
always returns the parent node, which may be a Document
or other node types.
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-US">
<body>
<script>
const html = document.querySelector("html");
console.log(html.parentElement); // null
console.log(html.parentNode); // document
</script>
</body>
</html>
Specifications Browser compatibility See also
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4