How to Append an Element to another Element using JavaScript

Updated onbyAlan Morel
How to Append an Element to another Element using JavaScript

JavaScript offers powerful functionality for manipulating the DOM.

One of the most common operations to perform is appending an element to another element.

Because of the hierarchical nature of the DOM, when you want to insert a new element, you will need to find the parent and then append it as a child.

In this post, we're going to learn how to append an element to another element using JavaScript.

Appending an Element to Another Element

To start off, you'll first need to get the parent that you want to append the child to.

You can use querySelector() to get the parent element:

JAVASCRIPT
const parent = document.querySelector(".parent");

Now you need to create the child element that you want to append to the parent.

To do this, you can use the createElement() method from the document object.

Then after that, feel free to add any attributes you want to the element, including the innerHTML:

JAVASCRIPT
const child = document.createElement("div"); child.setAttribute("class", "child"); child.innerHTML = "Hello World!";

Once you have the parent and child, you can proceed to append the child to the parent:

JAVASCRIPT
const parent = document.querySelector(".parent"); const child = document.createElement("div"); child.setAttribute("class", "child"); child.innerHTML = "Hello World!"; parent.appendChild(child);

Keep in mind that you can only append elements to elements, and not strings or raw HTML.

Also, you can only append one element at a time. If you want to append multiple elements, you will need to make multiple calls to appendChild.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to append an element to another element using JavaScript and the appendChild() method.

The function is straightforward, you just need to get the parent and child elements to successfully use this method.

Thanks for reading!

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