CharacterData: data property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨July 2015⁩.

The data property of the CharacterData interface represent the value of the current object's data.

Value

A string with the character information contained in the CharacterData node.

When set to the null value, that null value is converted to the empty string (""), so cd.data = null is equivalent to cd.data = "".

Note: CharacterData is an abstract interface. The examples below use two concrete interfaces implementing it, Text and Comment.

html

<!-- This is an HTML comment -->
<output id="result"></output>

const comment = document.body.childNodes[1];
const output = document.getElementById("result");

output.value = comment.data;

html

<span>Result: </span>Not set.

const span = document.querySelector("span");
const textNode = span.nextSibling;

textNode.data = "This text has been set using 'textNode.data'.";

Specification
DOM # dom-characterdata-data

This page was last modified on ⁨Jun 24, 2025⁩ by MDN contributors.