Element: insertAdjacentElement() method

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 insertAdjacentElement() method of the Element interface inserts a given element node at a given position relative to the element it is invoked upon.

Syntax

insertAdjacentElement(position, element)

Parameters

position

A string representing the position relative to the targetElement; must match (case-insensitively) one of the following strings:

'beforebegin': Before the targetElement itself.
'afterbegin': Just inside the targetElement, before its first child.
'beforeend': Just inside the targetElement, after its last child.
'afterend': After the targetElement itself.

element

The element to be inserted into the tree.

Return value

The element that was inserted, or null, if the insertion failed.

Exceptions

SyntaxError DOMException: Thrown if the position specified is not a recognized value.
TypeError: Thrown if the element specified is not a valid element.

Visualization of position names

html

<!-- beforebegin -->
<p>
  <!-- afterbegin -->
  foo
  <!-- beforeend -->
</p>
<!-- afterend -->

Note: The beforebegin and afterend positions work only if the node is in a tree and has an element parent.

Examples

beforeBtn.addEventListener("click", () => {
  const tempDiv = document.createElement("div");
  tempDiv.style.backgroundColor = randomColor();
  if (activeElem) {
    activeElem.insertAdjacentElement("beforebegin", tempDiv);
  }
  setListener(tempDiv);
});

afterBtn.addEventListener("click", () => {
  const tempDiv = document.createElement("div");
  tempDiv.style.backgroundColor = randomColor();
  if (activeElem) {
    activeElem.insertAdjacentElement("afterend", tempDiv);
  }
  setListener(tempDiv);
});

Have a look at our insertAdjacentElement.html demo on GitHub (see the source code too.) Here, we have a sequence of <div> elements inside a container. When one is clicked, it becomes selected and you can then press the Insert before and Insert after buttons to insert new divs before or after the selected element using insertAdjacentElement().

Specifications

Specification
DOM Standard # dom-element-insertadjacentelement

Browser compatibility

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