Safari Native Code

Is anyone familiar with Native Code in OS X Safari (Version 3 and WebKit)? I'm using Javascript to parse some information in a form and one of my inputs is named 'tags'. When tryin

Solution 1:

[native code] just means that it's a function that is built in to the browser, rather than written in JavaScript. tagsappears to be a WebKit extension to the DOM to allow you to get a list of elements in the form by tag name. For instance, if I run this on the StackOverflow page, I get the answer text area:

document.getElementById('submit-button').form.elements.tags("textarea")[0]

The issue is that an index into a collection in JavaScript also access any object properties (including methods), so when you try to access your named element tags, you get instead the method on the elements object that WebKit defines. Luckily, there is a workaround; you can call namedItem on the elements list to get an item by id or name:

var tags = button.form.elements.namedItem("tags").value;

edit: Note that its probably better to use namedItem in general even in other browsers, in case you need to retrieve an element named item or length or something like that; otherwise, if you use them as an index with the [] operator, you'll get the built in method item or length instead of your element.