How do I get an element name in cheerio with node.js

Question

How do I get an element's name in cheerio?

The jQuery equivalent would be .attr('name') but that returns undefined in cheerio.

Answer 1

There's only one case, I suppose, when $someElement.attr('name') returns undefined - if there's NO attribute name on that element. For example...

var cheerio = require('cheerio'),
    $ = cheerio.load(
      '<input id="one" type="input" /><input id="two" name="some_name" />');

console.log( $('#one').attr('name') ); // undefined
console.log( $('#two').attr('name') ); // some_name

Note that <name> attribute is only applicable to the following set of elements (MDN):

<a>, <applet>, <button>, <form>, <frame>, <iframe>, <img>, 
<input>, <map>, <meta>, <object>, <param>, <select>, <textarea>

---

To get the name of the element itself (it's tagName actually, but Cheerio abstracts it), use name property of the underlying element wrapped in Cheerio container, like this:

console.log( $('#one')[0].name ); // input 
console.log( $('#two')[0].name ); // input