Note : The Cells collection is Internet Explorer 4.0 specific. For properties, methods and events that are supported by <TD> and <TH> elements, see their respective topics.

The Cells collection is an ordered, indexed array, containing a reference to every cell in contained in a referenced <TR> element. This is a collection containing <TH> and <TD> elements.

Cell Objects would normally be retrieved by their index in the Cells collection (for example document.MyTR.cells(3) contains a reference to the 4th cell in the table row referenced by the MyTR reference (this could be the rows ID attribute), but a string value can be used, as long as that string is a valid identifier (ID attribute value) for an element in the document.

E.g.

document.MyTR.cells('MyGreyCell').width

...would return the value of the WIDTH attribute for the <TH> or <TD> element whose ID property is MyGreyCell, contained in the <TR> element referenced by MyTR

Properties

length
The length property returns the number of elements in the collection. Note that the length count starts at 1, not 0 as the cells collection index does. Therefore, the length property may return a value of 5, but to access the 3rd cell, you'd need to use document.MyTR.cells(2).property

Methods

item
The item method retrieves single items, or sub-collections from the cells collection. It accepts the following arguments:

<TR>reference.item(index, sub-index)

If index is a number, then the method returns a reference to the cell object at that position in the cell collections index.

If the index argument is a string value, then the item method returns a sub-collection, containing a reference to every cell in the row that has its ID or NAME attribute set to the string contained in the index argument. To retrieve certain element objects from this sub-collection, the sub-index argument must be used.

tags
The tags method returns a collection of cell objects whose tagName property is the same as the tag argument used for the method. This differs from the item property in that that interrogates ID and NAME values if necessary.

document.MyTR.cells.tags('TD')

would return a collection of just the <TD> cell objects in the row.

© 1995-1998, Stephen Le Hunte