element.getAttribute("class")

Why are even the simple things sometimes hard? Attempting to get a element attribute. Here is a table of what the various browsers return when trying to get the class attribute having already found an element:

var element = document.getElementById("theSpan");

in a document containing the HTML:

<span id="theSpan" class="something">

Browser	element. getAttribute( "class" );	element. getAttribute( "CLASS" );	element. getAttribute( "className" );	element. attributes[ "class" ];	element. className;
Firefox 2.0	something	something	null	[object Attr]	something
Opera 9.0	something	something	null	[object Attr]	something
Safari 1.3.2	something	something	null	undefined	something
IE 5.5 (Mac)	null	null	something	something	something
IE 7.0	null	null	something	[object]	something

Updated: Thanks to anonymous for pointing out that you can just use element.className to get the class name used and it seems to work correctly across all browsers I tested.

It seems that there is no simple way to get the class attribute across browsers. The solution seems to be to get the class attribute and if it undefined try the className attribute. Most other attributes should work fine, it is just that IE doesn't like the class attribute that throws the spanner in the works. Here is the quick testing page.