Filters are objects that know how to "filter out" nodes. If a
NodeIterator
or
TreeWalker
is given a filter, it applies the filter before it returns the next node. If the filter says to accept the node, the iterator returns it; otherwise, the iterator looks for the next node and pretends that the node that was rejected was not there.
The DOM does not provide any filters. Filter is just an interface that users can implement to provide their own filters.
Filters do not need to know how to iterate, nor do they need to know anything about the data structure that is being iterated. This makes it very easy to write filters, since the only thing they have to know how to do is evaluate a single node. One filter may be used with a number of different kinds of iterators, encouraging code reuse. This is an ECMAScript function reference. This method returns ashort
. The parameter is of type Node
.
@since DOM Level 2