CharacterData: data property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The data property of the CharacterData interface represent the value of the current object's data.

Value

A string with the character information contained in the CharacterData node.

When set to the null value, that null value is converted to the empty string (""), so cd.data = null is equivalent to cd.data = "".

Example

Note: CharacterData is an abstract interface. The examples below use two concrete interfaces implementing it, Text and Comment.

Reading a comment using data

html
<!-- This is an HTML comment -->
<output id="result"></output>
js
const comment = document.body.childNodes[1];
const output = document.getElementById("result");

output.value = comment.data;

Setting the content of a text node using data

html
<span>Result: </span>Not set.
js
const span = document.querySelector("span");
const textNode = span.nextSibling;

textNode.data = "This text has been set using 'textNode.data'.";

Specifications

Specification
DOM Standard
# dom-characterdata-data

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also