pure javascript equivalent of jquery click()?

Question

I am building a small app which captures mouse clicks. I wrote the prototype in jquery but, since it is a small app focusing on speed, embedding jquery to use just one function would be an overkill.

I tried to adapt this example from JavascriptKit:

document.getElementById("alphanumeric").onkeypress=function(e){  
    //blah..blah..blah..  
}

but it didn't work when I tried

document.getElementsByTagName("x").onclick

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Say you have a list of p tags you would like to capture the click for the p tag:

var p = document.getElementsByTagName("p"); 
for(var i=0; i<p.length; i++){ 
 p[i].onclick = function(){ 
   alert("p is clicked and the id is " + this.id); 
 } 
}

Check out an example here for more clarity: http://jsbin.com/onaci/

Answer 2

In your example you are using getElementsByTagName, which returns you an array of DOM elements, you could iterate that array and assign the onclick handler to each element, for example:

var clickHandler = function(){
  alert('clicked!');
}

var elements = document.getElementsByTagName('div'); // All divs

for(var i = 0; i<elements.length; i++){
  elements[i].onclick = clickHandler;
}