Element.setAttribute()

JavaScript’s Element.setAttribute() method sets the value of an attribute of the Element.

Syntax

Element.setAttribute(name, value);

Parameters

name
A string containing the name of the element’s attribute whose value is to be set.

value
A string containing the value to assign to the attribute.

Return value

The setAttribute() method does not have a return value, which means that the method implicitly returns undefined.

Exceptions

InvalidCharacterError DOMException

Thrown if the specified attribute name contains one or more characters that are not valid in attribute names.

Examples

Here is an example of using the JavaScript setAttribute() method.

Consider the following line of HTML:

<a href="https://javascriptguide.com" target="_blank">JavaScript Guide</a>

How can we modify the value of the target attribute with JavaScript?

Well, we can select the a element with the querySelector() method and use the setAttribute() method:

let a = document.querySelector('a');
a.setAttribute('target', '_self');
console.log(a.getAttribute('target'));

The last line logs the current value of the attribute to the console of your browser.

Browser compatibility

See also

• Element.getAttribute()
• Element.hasAttribute()
• Element.removeAttribute()