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>

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

output.value = comment.data;

html

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

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

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

Specification

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