Element: outerHTML 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 outerHTML attribute of the Element DOM interface gets the serialized HTML fragment describing the element including its descendants. It can also be set to replace the element with nodes parsed from the given string.

To only obtain the HTML representation of the contents of an element, or to replace the contents of an element, use the innerHTML property instead.

Value

Reading the value of outerHTML returns a string containing an HTML serialization of the element and its descendants. Setting the value of outerHTML replaces the element and all of its descendants with a new DOM tree constructed by parsing the specified htmlString.

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

Exceptions

SyntaxError DOMException: Thrown if an attempt was made to set outerHTML using an HTML string which is not valid.
NoModificationAllowedError DOMException: Thrown if an attempt was made to set outerHTML on an element which is a direct child of a Document, such as Document.documentElement.

Examples

Getting the value of an element's outerHTML property

HTML

html

<div id="d">
  <p>Content</p>
  <p>Further Elaborated</p>
</div>

JavaScript

const d = document.getElementById("d");
console.log(d.outerHTML);

// The string '<div id="d"><p>Content</p><p>Further Elaborated</p></div>'
// is written to the console window

Replacing a node by setting the outerHTML property

HTML

html

<div id="container">
  <div id="d">This is a div.</div>
</div>

JavaScript

const container = document.getElementById("container");
const d = document.getElementById("d");

console.log(container.firstElementChild.nodeName); // logs "DIV"

d.outerHTML = "<p>This paragraph replaced the original div.</p>";

console.log(container.firstElementChild.nodeName); // logs "P"

// The #d div is no longer part of the document tree,
// the new paragraph replaced it.

Notes

If the element has no parent node, setting its outerHTML property will not change it or its descendants. For example:

const div = document.createElement("div");
div.outerHTML = '<div class="test">test</div>';
console.log(div.outerHTML); // output: "<div></div>"

Also, while the element will be replaced in the document, the variable whose outerHTML property was set will still hold a reference to the original element:

const p = document.querySelector("p");
console.log(p.nodeName); // shows: "P"
p.outerHTML = "<div>This div replaced a paragraph.</div>";
console.log(p.nodeName); // still "P";

The returned value will contain HTML escaped attributes:

const anc = document.createElement("a");
anc.href = "https://developer.mozilla.org?a=b&c=d";
console.log(anc.outerHTML); // output: "<a href='https://developer.mozilla.org?a=b&amp;c=d'></a>"

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # dom-element-outerhtml

Browser compatibility

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