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CharacterData: data 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 data property of the CharacterData interface represent the value of the current object's data.

Value

A string with the character information contained in the CharacterData node.

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

Example

Note: CharacterData is an abstract interface. The examples below use two concrete interfaces implementing it, Text and Comment.

Reading a comment using data

<!-- This is an HTML comment -->
<output id="result"></output>
const comment = document.body.childNodes[1];
const output = document.getElementById("result");

output.value = comment.data;

Setting the content of a text node using data

<span>Result: </span>Not set.
const span = document.querySelector("span");
const textNode = span.nextSibling;

textNode.data = "This text has been set using 'textNode.data'.";

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Opera Safari Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet WebView Android WebView on iOS
data 1 12 1 ≤12.1 1 18 4 ≤12.1 1 1.0 4.4 1

See also

© 2005–2025 MDN contributors.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CharacterData/data