The following description is taken from this page:
The getElementsByClassName() method returns a collection of all elements in the document with the specified class name, as a NodeList object.
The NodeList object represents a collection of nodes. The nodes can be accessed by index numbers. The index starts at 0.
Tip: You can use the length property of the NodeList object to determine the number of elements with a specified class name, then you can loop through all elements and extract the info you want.
So, as a parameter getElementsByClassName would accept a class name.
If this is your HTML body:
<div id="first" class="menuItem"></div> <div id="second" class="menuItem"></div> <div id="third" class="menuItem"></div> <div id="footer"></div> then var menuItems = document.getElementsByClassName('menuItem') would return a collection (not an array) of the 3 upper <div>s, as they match the given class name.
You can then iterate over this nodes (<div>s in this case) collection with:
for (var menuItemIndex = 0 ; menuItemIndex < menuItems.length ; menuItemIndex ++) { var currentMenuItem = menuItems[menuItemIndex]; // do stuff with currentMenuItem as a node. } Please refer to this post for more on differences between elements and nodes.