How to get the class of the clicked element?

Here’s a quick jQuery example that adds a click event to each “li” tag, and then retrieves the class attribute for the clicked element.

$("li").click(function() {
   var myClass = $(this).attr("class");
   alert(myClass);
});

Equally, you don’t have to wrap the object in jQuery:

$("li").click(function() {
   var myClass = this.className;
   alert(myClass);
});

And in newer browsers you can get the full list of class names:

$("li").click(function() {
   var myClasses = this.classList;
   alert(myClasses.length + " " + myClasses[0]);
});

You can emulate classList in older browsers using myClass.split(/\s+/);