Document: open() method
The Document.open() method opens a document for writing.
This does come with some side effects. For example:
- All event listeners currently registered on the document, nodes inside the document, or the document's window are removed.
- All existing nodes are removed from the document.
Syntax
open() Parameters
None.
Return value
A Document object instance.
Examples
The following simple code opens the document and replaces its content with a number of different HTML fragments, before closing it again.
document.open(); document.write("<p>Hello world!</p>"); document.write("<p>I am a fish</p>"); document.write("<p>The number is 42</p>"); document.close(); Notes
An automatic document.open() call happens when document.write() is called after the page has loaded.
Content Security
This method is subject to the same same-origin policy as other properties, and does not work if doing so would change the document's origin.
Three-argument document.open()
There is a lesser-known and little-used three-argument version of document.open(), which is an alias of Window.open() (see its page for full details).
This call, for example opens github.com in a new window, with its opener set to null:
document.open("https://www.github.com", "", "noopener=true"); Two-argument document.open()
Browsers used to support a two-argument document.open(), with the following signature:
document.open(type, replace); Where type specified the MIME type of the data you are writing (e.g. text/html) and replace if set (i.e., a string of "replace") specified that the history entry for the new document would replace the current history entry of the document being written to.
This form is now obsolete; it won't throw an error, but instead just forwards to document.open() (i.e., is the equivalent of just running it with no arguments). The history-replacement behavior now always happens.
Specifications
| Specification |
|---|
| HTML # dom-document-open-dev |