Note : Both Internet Explorer and Netscape support the links collection.

The links collection is an ordered, indexed (by source order) array, containing a reference to every <A> and <AREA> elements in a document. Note that <A> elements that contain a NAME attribute (and are therefore Anchors) will be included in the links collection if they also have a HREF attribute (and are therefore both links and anchors). For properties, methods and events supported by <A> and <AREA> elements, see their respective topics.

LInk Objects would normally be retrieved by their index in the links collection (for example, above document.links(3).href would return the HREF property of the 4th link in the document (that may be an <A> or <AREA> element), 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.links('BigExternalLink').title

returns the value of the TITLE attribute of the link whose ID property is 'BigExternalLink. This would be the same as document.BigExternalLink.title.

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 links collection index does. Therefore, the length property may return a value of 5, but to access the 3rd element, you'd need to use document.links(2).property

Methods

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

all.item(index, sub-index)

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

strTag=document.links.item(7).innerHTML

would make strTag equal to the innerHTML property of the documents 8th link.

If the index property is a string value, then the item method returns a sub-collection, containing a reference to every link in the document 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 link 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.all.tags('AREA')

would return a collection of all the <AREA> element objects in the document and none of the <A> element objects.

© 1995-1998, Stephen Le Hunte