Rails spinoffs - Jul 2005 - autocomplete: how to access a child element of <li>

hi.

i promise this will be my last question for the day.

still playing with autocompleter, everything is working ok, but i''m  
having difficulties accessing just the href attribute of <a> element,  
which is a child of <li> in the autocomplete response, i.e:

<div class ="autocomplete">
<ul>
<li><a href
="overtherainbow.html">somewhere</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

i thought i could do something like

el = Event.findElement(event, ''LI'');
href = el.firstChild.getAttribute(''href'');

but that''s not it...

if anybody can awake me from my dogmatic slumber, i will greatly  
appreciate it...
all best,
tench

Tench wrote:
> i thought i could do something like
> 
> el = Event.findElement(event, ''LI'');
> href = el.firstChild.getAttribute(''href'');
> 
> but that''s not it...
I haven''t been following this conversation, so I may be way out of
line.
  But I think you want to do something more like this:

href =
el.getElementsByTagName(''a'')[0].getAttribute(''href'');

or

href = el.getElementsByTagName(''a'')[0].href;


See Stuart Langridge''s ''DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using
JavaScript
& DOM''
<http://www.sitepoint.com/article/dhtml-utopia-modern-web-design/2> for
a DOM primer.


HTH,

Faust

On 28/07/05, Tench <psychomachine@mac.com> wrote:
> having difficulties accessing just the href attribute of <a> element,
> which is a child of <li> in the autocomplete response, i.e:
> 
> <div class ="autocomplete">
> <ul>
> <li><a href
="overtherainbow.html">somewhere</a></li>
> </ul>
> </div>
> 
> i thought i could do something like
> 
> el = Event.findElement(event, ''LI'');
> href = el.firstChild.getAttribute(''href'');
> 
> but that''s not it...
For the example above, this should work. But if there is any text
between <li> and <a>, the firstChild will be a text node. Depending
on
the browser, even just spaces/newline between them creates a text
node.

Bye,
Martin