Document: forms property

The forms read-only property of the Document interface returns an HTMLCollection listing all the <form> elements contained in the document.

[!NOTE] Similarly, you can access a list of a form’s component user input elements using the elements property.

You can also access named <form> elements as properties of the document object. For example, document["login-form"] and document.forms["login-form"] can both be used to access the form named login-form.

[!WARNING] Relying on the document["form-name"] pattern is dangerous and discouraged because it can lead to unexpected conflicts with existing or future APIs in the browser. For example, if a browser introduces a built-in document["login-form"] property in the future, your code may no longer be able to access the form element. To avoid such conflicts, always use document.forms to access named forms.

Value

An HTMLCollection object listing all of the document’s forms. Each item in the collection is a HTMLFormElement representing a single <form> element.

If the document has no forms, the returned collection is empty, with a length of zero.

Examples

Getting form information

<form id="robby">
  <input type="button" value="robby's form" />
</form>

<form id="dave">
  <input type="button" value="dave's form" />
</form>

<form id="paul">
  <input type="button" value="paul's form" />
</form>

document.querySelectorAll("input[type=button]").forEach((button, i) => {
  button.addEventListener("click", (event) => {
    console.log(document.forms[i].id);
  });
});

Getting an element from within a form

const selectForm = document.forms[index];
const selectFormElement = document.forms[index].elements[index];

Named form access

<form name="login">
  <input name="email" type="email" />
  <input name="password" type="password" />
  <button type="submit">Log in</button>
</form>

const loginForm = document.forms.login; // Or document.forms['login']
loginForm.elements.email.placeholder = "test@example.com";
loginForm.elements.password.placeholder = "password";

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• HTML forms
• <form> and the HTMLFormElement interface