Sometimes you need to create an HTML button programmatically as a result of some code execution. You can easily create a button using JavaScript by calling on the document.createElement("button") method.
For example, let’s create a <button> that says "Click Me" using JavaScript:
- First, you call the
document.createElement("button")and assign the returned element to a variable namedbtn. - Then, assign the
"Click Me"string to thebtn.innerHTMLproperty - Finally, use
document.body.appendChild()to append the button element to the<body>tag
The code below shows how this can be done:
let btn = document.createElement("button");
btn.innerHTML = "Click Me";
document.body.appendChild(btn);
You can append the button element that you’ve created with JavaScript anywhere inside your HTML page by using the appendChild() method.
You can also set the button’s name, type, or value attributes as required by your project. Sometimes, you need to create a type='submit' button for forms:
let btn = document.createElement("button");
btn.innerHTML = "Submit";
btn.type = "submit";
btn.name = "formBtn";
document.body.appendChild(btn);
The code above will create the following HTML <button> tag:
<button type="submit" name="formBtn">
Submit
</button>
Finally, if you want to execute some code when the button is clicked, you can change the onclick property to call a function as follows:
let btn = document.createElement("button");
btn.innerHTML = "Save";
btn.onclick = function () {
alert("Button is clicked");
};
document.body.appendChild(btn);
or you can also add an event listener as follows:
let btn = document.createElement("button");
btn.innerHTML = "Save";
btn.addEventListener("click", function () {
alert("Button is clicked");
});
document.body.appendChild(btn);
And that’s how you can create a button programmatically using JavaScript.
