Accessing elements by type in JavaScript

If you are lucky and need to care only for recent browsers, you can use:

document.querySelectorAll('input[type=text]')

"recent" means not IE6 and IE7

In plain-old JavaScript you can do this:

var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName('input');

for(var i = 0; i < inputs.length; i++) {
    if(inputs[i].type.toLowerCase() == 'text') {
        alert(inputs[i].value);
    }
}

In jQuery, you would just do:

// select all inputs of type 'text' on the page
$("input:text")

// hide all text inputs which are descendants of div class="foo"
$("div.foo input:text").hide();

The sizzle selector engine (what powers JQuery) is perfectly geared up for this:

var elements = $('input[type=text]');

Or

var elements = $('input:text');