Removing an anonymous event listener

Is there anyway to remove an event listener added like this:

element.addEventListener(event, function(){/* do work here */}, false);

Without replacing the element?

There is no way to cleanly remove an event handler unless you stored a reference to the event handler at creation.

I will generally add these to the main object on that page, then you can iterate and cleanly dispose of them when done with that object.

You could remove the event listener like this:

element.addEventListener("click", function clicked() {
    element.removeEventListener("click", clicked, false);
}, false);

Anonymous bound event listeners

The easiest way to remove all event listeners for an element is to assign its outerHTML to itself. What this does is send a string representation of the HTML through the HTML parser and assign the parsed HTML to the element. Because no JavaScript is passed, there will be no bound event listeners.

document.getElementById('demo').addEventListener('click', function(){
    alert('Clickrd');
    this.outerHTML = this.outerHTML;
}, false);

<a id="demo" href="javascript:void(0)">Click Me</a>

Anonymous delegated event listeners

The one caveat is delegated event listeners, or event listeners on a parent element that watch for every event matching a set of criteria on its children. The only way to get past that is to alter the element to not meet the criteria of the delegated event listener.

document.body.addEventListener('click', function(e){
    if(e.target.id === 'demo') {
        alert('Clickrd');
        e.target.id = 'omed';
    }
}, false);

<a id="demo" href="javascript:void(0)">Click Me</a>