jQuery - Getting class of an element through the event.target property

Question

I have the following code:

    <script type="text/javascript">
       $("*").click(function(event){
         var x = event.target;

         if (x.nodeName == "DIV"){                  
           alert(x.attr("class"));
         }

       })
    </script>

This throws an 'undefined' exception... Is there any other way to get the class of an element which triggered the 'click' event? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

event.target is a DOM object. So to use jQuery methods you have to convert it to jQuery object:

alert($(x).attr("class"));

Otherwise, you may use property className to get the class of the element:

alert(x.className);

BTW, in your example you may simply use this keyword instead of event.target.

Answer 2

jQuery offers some syntactic sugar to help with your check - .is() allows you to validate an element against any other valid selector:

var $target = event.target;
if ($target.is('div')){
  alert($target.attr('class'));
}

There are some further changes to consider:

• .click(handler) is explicitly assigned to the matching elements (every single element in your case). This adds overhead; also the handler will not apply to any element added dynamically after the handler assignment is executed. Instead, delegate the handler by using on()
• refactor your logic so that instead of handling every single click and validating it you could make it applicable only to divs in the first place by changing the selector to $('div')
• rely on this which is pretty much the convention

After all these changes the code becomes smaller and more readable:

$('div').on('click', function() {
  alert($(this).attr('class'));
});