Check if an element contains a class in JavaScript?

Question

Using plain JavaScript (not jQuery), Is there any way to check if an element contains a class?

Currently, I'm doing this:

The issue is that if I change the HTML to this...

<div id="test" class="class1 class5"></div>

...there's no longer an exact match, so I get the default output of nothing (""). But I still want the output to be I have class1 because the <div> still contains the .class1 class.

Answer 1

Use element.classList .contains method:

element.classList.contains(class);

This works on all current browsers and there are polyfills to support older browsers too.

---

Alternatively, if you work with older browsers and don't want to use polyfills to fix them, using indexOf is correct, but you have to tweak it a little:

function hasClass(element, className) {
    return (' ' + element.className + ' ').indexOf(' ' + className+ ' ') > -1;
}

Otherwise you will also get true if the class you are looking for is part of another class name.

DEMO

jQuery uses a similar (if not the same) method.

---

Applied to the example:

As this does not work together with the switch statement, you could achieve the same effect with this code:

var test = document.getElementById("test"),
    classes = ['class1', 'class2', 'class3', 'class4'];

test.innerHTML = "";

for(var i = 0, j = classes.length; i < j; i++) {
    if(hasClass(test, classes[i])) {
        test.innerHTML = "I have " + classes[i];
        break;
    }
}

It's also less redundant ;)