Get attribute name value of <input>

Question

Give your input an ID and use the attr method:

var name = $("#id").attr("name");

Use the attr method of jQuery like this:

alert($('input').attr('name'));

Note that you can also use attr to set the attribute values by specifying second argument:

$('input').attr('name', 'new_name')

While there is no denying that jQuery is a powerful tool, it is a really bad idea to use it for such a trivial operation as "get an element's attribute value".

Judging by the current accepted answer, I am going to assume that you were able to add an ID attribute to your element and use that to select it.

With that in mind, here are two pieces of code. First, the code given to you in the Accepted Answer:

$("#ID").attr("name");

And second, the Vanilla JS version of it:

document.getElementById('ID').getAttribute("name");

My results:

• jQuery: 300k operations / second
• JavaScript: 11,000k operations / second

You can test for yourself here. The "plain JavaScript" vesion is over 35 times faster than the jQuery version.

Now, that's just for one operation, over time you will have more and more stuff going on in your code. Perhaps for something particularly advanced, the optimal "pure JavaScript" solution would take one second to run. The jQuery version might take 30 seconds to a whole minute! That's huge! People aren't going to sit around for that. Even the browser will get bored and offer you the option to kill the webpage for taking too long!

As I said, jQuery is a powerful tool, but it should not be considered the answer to everything.

var value_input = $("input[name*='xxxx']").val();