Hide all elements by Class using JavaScript

Hide all elements by Class using JavaScript #

To hide all elements by class:

Use the getElementsByClassName method to get a collection of HTML elements.
Iterate over the collection using the for...of loop.
Set the style.display property to none on each element.

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 class="box">Box 1</div>
    <div class="box">Box 2</div>
    <div class="box">Box 3</div>

    <button id="btn">Click me</button>

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

And here is the related JavaScript code.

index.js

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

btn.addEventListener('click', () => {
  const boxes = document.getElementsByClassName('box');

  for (const box of boxes) {
    // 👇️ Remove element from DOM
    box.style.display = 'none';

    // 👇️ hide element (still takes up space on page)
    // box.style.visibility = 'hidden';
  }
});

We used the document.getElementsByClassName() method to get an HTMLCollection of the elements with the specific class.

We used the for...of loop to iterate over the collection and on each iteration, we set the element's display property to none to hide it.

Note that the getElementsByClassName method returns an HTML collection and not an array. If you want to convert the collection to an array, pass it to the Array.from method.

index.js

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

btn.addEventListener('click', () => {
  // 👇️ Use Array.from to convert to array
  const boxes = Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('box'));

  boxes.forEach(box => {
    // 👇️ Remove element from DOM
    box.style.display = 'none';

    // 👇️ hide element (still takes up space on page)
    // box.style.visibility = 'hidden';
  });
});

After converting the HTMLCollection to an array, we are able to use any of the array-supported methods in JavaScript, e.g. Array.forEach.

To hide each element, we set its display property to none, however you might need to use the visibility property depending on your use case.

When an element's display property is set to none, the element is removed from the DOM and has no effect on the layout. The document is rendered as though the element does not exist.

On the other hand, when an element's visibility property is set to hidden, it still takes up space on the page, however the element is invisible (not drawn). It still affects the layout on your page as normal.

Here is an example that uses the visibility property to hide all of the elements by class.

index.js

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

btn.addEventListener('click', () => {
  const boxes = Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('box'));

  boxes.forEach(box => {
    // 👇️ hide element (still takes up space on page)
    box.style.visibility = 'hidden';
  });
});

If you click on the button, you'll see that the div elements disappear, however they still take up space on the page.

This is the difference between setting visibility to hidden and display to none.

This might be your preferred solution if you're looking to avoid shifting the contents on the page, which might be confusing to users.

Hide all elements by Class using JavaScript

Hide all elements by Class using JavaScript #

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Borislav Hadzhiev