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ProcessingInstruction: target 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 read-only target property of the ProcessingInstruction interface represent the application to which the ProcessingInstruction is targeted.

For example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

is a processing instruction whose target is xml.

Value

A string containing the name of the application.

Example

In an XML document

let parser = new DOMParser();
const doc = parser.parseFromString(
  '<?xml version="1.0"?><test/>',
  "application/xml",
);
const pi = doc.createProcessingInstruction(
  "xml-stylesheet",
  'href="mycss.css" type="text/css"',
);
doc.insertBefore(pi, doc.firstChild);

const output = document.querySelector("output");
output.textContent = `This processing instruction's target is: ${doc.firstChild.target}`;

In an HTML document

The processing instruction line will be considered, and represented, as a Comment object.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<pre></pre>

const node = document.querySelector("pre").previousSibling.previousSibling;
const result = `Node with the processing instruction: ${node.nodeName}: ${node.nodeValue}\n`;
document.querySelector("pre").textContent = result;

Specifications

Specification
DOM> # dom-processinginstruction-target>

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
`target`	1	12	1	≤12.1	1	18	4	≤12.1	1	1.0	4.4	1