Search code examples
javascripthtmlinclude

How do I get document.getElementsByTagName('').innerHTML to make text between 2 tags?

I'm trying to use JavaScript to include a footer on several webpages, so if I want to change the footer, I only have to change it in one place. PHP is not available on this server and neither are server side inserts (SSI), but Perl, Python, and Tcl are available. I have been trying with document.getElementsByTagName('footer').innerHTML = "text"; but it doesn't produce text. I copied this code from dev.mozilla, and it tells me how many tags I have:

var footer = document.getElementsByTagName('footer');
var num = footer.length;
console.log('There is ' + num + ' footer in this document');

So, I don't know what's wrong with the innerHTML script. I also tried with paragraph tags and got the same results in both cases.

Solution

  • I just figured out that getElementsByTagName() results in an array, so I have to refer to the footer's index with [0]:

    var footerTags = document.getElementsByTagName('footer');
footerTags[0].innerHTML = "test";