Add class to an element

Two years later (2012/06), there is a new and shiny approach - element.classList with methods add(), remove(), toggle(), contains().

rows[i].classList.add("alt"); 

Supported by

• Chrome 8+
• Firefox 3.6+
• Internet Explorer 10+
• Opera 11.50+
• Safari 5.1+

Try rows[i].className += " alt";

This will only add the class name if it doesn't already exist

var classToAdd = 'alt'; if (rows.className.length == 0) { rows.className = classToAdd; } else if (rows.className.indexOf(classToAdd) < 0) { rows.className += ' ' + classToAdd; } 

You might want to use a Javascript framework. It turns out that Firefox and Internet Explorer both have different approaches for adding class names.

For Firefox, I believe you have to do

element.setAttribute('class','<className>'); 

while in IE, you can do

element.className='<className>'; 

EDIT

It turns out that Firefox supports the element.className attribute. However, Internet Explorer doesn't understand element.setAttribute('class'...). You have to do element.setAttribute('className'...) if you want to use the setAttribute function call.

jQuery provide an interface where you can do

$(element).addClass('<className>'); 

and it takes care of all the browser ambiguities. There are also removeClass() and hasClass() functions for managing and testing class attributes.

So in your scenario, you'd do:

var tables = document.getElementsByClassName('tableData'); var rows = tables[0].getElementsByTagName('tr'); for(var i=1; i<rows.length; i +=2) { // alert(rows[i]); $(rows[i]).addClass("alt"); } 

Note that you could simplify this further with more jQuery functionality.

This should work even when the attribute isn't already present:

rows[i].setAttribute("class", "alt"); 

http://www.w3schools.com/Dom/met_element_setattribute.asp