Getting object of anchor tag using getElementById

anchorobject = document.getElementById('backbutton');
alert(anchorobject);

<a href="http://www.hotmail.com" id="backbutton">back</a>

The above code alerts the href attribute string (http://www.hotmail.com). Not the object itself. The file I am editing is just a local file which I want to use in some third party program in the future. First, I am coding it on my local computer. When I 开发者_Python百科try to get the object of a DIV it works just fine.

Why can't I get the object of an anchor (<a>) tag in JavaScript using document.getElementById()?

---

You are getting the anchor object. It's just that alert is a very poor debugging solution. If you alert an anchor object, it will just show you it's href. See this example. Instead, I would recommend using Firebug or Chrome with console.log.

---

How about this?

 alert(anchorobject.getAttribute("href"));

---

The anchorobject is your actuall anchor object, but if you use it as a string (in your case with an alert()), the object's toString() method creates a string from the href tag.