I am curious to understand the reasons behind the occurrence of this ID problem

When I format my code like this

const title = document.getElementById("title");


function handleClick() {
    title.style.color = "red";
}

title.addEventListener("click", handleClick);

everything works fine. However, if I change it to this

const title = document.getElementById("#title");


function handleClick() {
    title.style.color = "red";
}

title.addEventListener("click", handleClick);

it stops working. Can someone please explain why this is happening? Thank you.

Answer №1

It is important to remember that when using document.getElementById(), you must provide the exact id without any additional characters.

For example, if your HTML looks like this;

<div id='title'>My Title</div>

You would use document.getElementById("title") to access this element successfully.

On the other hand, using

document.getElementById("#title")
will not work because the "#" symbol should not be included in the ID parameter.


const test_1 = document.getElementById('title');
const test_2 = document.getElementById('#title');

console.log(test_1);   // This will output the correct element as the id matches
console.log(test_2);   // This will output NULL as the id does not match properly
<div id='title'>

Answer №2

: is a symbol used in CSS selectors, but it cannot be utilized in JavaScript. Javascript typically finds elements by their ID through the

document.getElementById("ID")
method. On the other hand, you can use . to target classes in CSS, however, in JavaScript, you would need to access elements of a particular class with
document.getElementsByClassName("CLASSNAME")
. Attempting to use
document.getElementById("#id")
will cause confusion for JavaScript as it searches for an element with an id attribute set as id = "#id" rather than just id = "id".

Answer №3

Essentially, it can be explained that the symbol # serves as a separator for identifying ids in a similar way as the symbol . does for classes.

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