Clone an Element and change its ID using JavaScript

Clone an Element and change its ID using JavaScript #

To clone an element and change its id:

Use the cloneNode() method to clone the element.
Set a different id property on the element.
For example, clone.id = 'another-id'.

Here is the HTML for the examples in this article.

index.html

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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  </head>

  <body>
    <div id="box">
      <p>Child 1</p>
      <p>Child 2</p>
    </div>

    <script src="index.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

And here is the related JavaScript code.

index.js

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const box = document.getElementById('box');

// ✅ Clone node and its descendants
const clone = box.cloneNode(true);

// ✅ Change clone's id
clone.id = 'cloned-box';

// 👇️ Add clone to body
document.body.appendChild(clone);

We used the getElementById() method to select the element we want to clone.

We called the cloneNode method on the element.

The cloneNode() method returns a duplicate of the node on which it was called.

The only parameter the method takes is whether the node's descendants should be cloned as well.

If set to false, only the node will be cloned, excluding child elements andText nodes.

We set the id attribute on the clone to the value of cloned-box.

You might also use the setAttribute method to achieve the same result.

index.js

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const box = document.getElementById('box');

// ✅ Clone node and its descendants
const clone = box.cloneNode(true);

// ✅ Change clone's id
clone.setAttribute('id', 'cloned-box');

// 👇️ Add clone to body
document.body.appendChild(clone);

The setAttribute method takes 2 parameters:

name - the name of the attribute whose value is to be set.
value - the value to assign to the attribute.

If the attribute already exists on the element, the value is updated, otherwise a new attribute is added with the specified name and value.

The last step is to use the appendChild method to add the element to the DOM.

In the example, we called the method on the body, however it can be called on any Node.

The appendChild method adds a node to the end of the list of children of the element it was called on.

It should be noted that the cloneNode method does not copy event listeners that were added using the addEventListener() method and events assigned to element properties, e.g. box.onclick = function() .

If I load the page with the code from the example, I can see that the div element was cloned and its id has been changed successfully.

element cloned id changed

Clone an Element and change its ID using JavaScript

Clone an Element and change its ID using JavaScript #

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Borislav Hadzhiev