Baseline Widely available
The outerHTML
attribute of the Element
DOM interface gets the serialized HTML fragment describing the element including its descendants. It can also be set to replace the element with nodes parsed from the given string.
To only obtain the HTML representation of the contents of an element, or to replace the contents of an element, use the innerHTML
property instead.
Note that some browsers serialize the <
and >
characters as <
and >
when they appear in attribute values (see Browser compatibility). This is to prevent a potential security vulnerability (mutation XSS) in which an attacker can craft input that bypasses a sanitization function, enabling a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack.
Reading the value of outerHTML
returns a string containing an HTML serialization of the element
and its descendants. Setting the value of outerHTML
replaces the element and all of its descendants with a new DOM tree constructed by parsing the specified htmlString
.
When set to the null
value, that null
value is converted to the empty string (""
), so elt.outerHTML = null
is equivalent to elt.outerHTML = ""
.
SyntaxError
DOMException
Thrown if an attempt was made to set outerHTML
using an HTML string which is not valid.
NoModificationAllowedError
DOMException
Thrown if an attempt was made to set outerHTML
on an element which is a direct child of a Document
, such as Document.documentElement
.
<div id="d">
<p>Content</p>
<p>Further Elaborated</p>
</div>
JavaScript
const d = document.getElementById("d");
console.log(d.outerHTML);
// The string '<div id="d"><p>Content</p><p>Further Elaborated</p></div>'
// is written to the console window
Replacing a node by setting the outerHTML property HTML
<div id="container">
<div id="d">This is a div.</div>
</div>
JavaScript
const container = document.getElementById("container");
const d = document.getElementById("d");
console.log(container.firstElementChild.nodeName); // logs "DIV"
d.outerHTML = "<p>This paragraph replaced the original div.</p>";
console.log(container.firstElementChild.nodeName); // logs "P"
// The #d div is no longer part of the document tree,
// the new paragraph replaced it.
Notes
If the element has no parent node, setting its outerHTML
property will not change it or its descendants. For example:
const div = document.createElement("div");
div.outerHTML = '<div class="test">test</div>';
console.log(div.outerHTML); // output: "<div></div>"
Also, while the element will be replaced in the document, the variable whose outerHTML
property was set will still hold a reference to the original element:
const p = document.querySelector("p");
console.log(p.nodeName); // shows: "P"
p.outerHTML = "<div>This div replaced a paragraph.</div>";
console.log(p.nodeName); // still "P";
The returned value will contain HTML escaped attributes:
const anc = document.createElement("a");
anc.href = "https://developer.mozilla.org?a=b&c=d";
console.log(anc.outerHTML); // output: "<a href='https://developer.mozilla.org?a=b&c=d'></a>"
Specifications Browser compatibility See also
XMLSerializer
DOMParser
HTMLElement.outerText
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