Undocumented attribs property safe to use?

I was looking for a way to move all of one element’s attributes to another element and noticed the attribs property on cheerio elements which seemed to be exactly what I needed but it’s not documented anywhere that I could see. It is however used in the example in htmlparser2’s readme so I’m wondering if this property is safe to use of if there’s a better way getting at all attributes.

[JamesMGreene]

To clarify on that unfortunately cryptic closure message, it would appear the TypeScript type definitions show an attr() method that can be invoked without any arguments to return a simple object map of key-value pairs:

https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio/blob/a3363012de3ddf4dafe91e89864d8feca9d28722/types/index.d.ts#L18

As shown in tests also:

https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio/blob/a3363012de3ddf4dafe91e89864d8feca9d28722/test/api/attributes.js#L16-L20

[plocket]

I’m finding that currently .attr('value') and .attribs.value are returning two different things. Not sure if this is the right place to put this, but I found this thread while trying to find some context for this situation. I’m hoping this will help someone else with the same confusion in the future.

const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const html = '<input class="my_inputs" type="checkbox">';
const $ = cheerio.load( html );

let node = $( '.my_inputs' )[0];
let $node = $( node );
console.log( node.attribs.value );  // undefined (this is the result I would want)
console.log( $node.attr( 'value' ));  // 'on'

.attr('value') returns ‘on’ while .attribs.value returns undefined. If you’re looking for the ‘real’ value attribute, .attribs.value seems to give the most accurate to me at the moment for what it’s worth.

Again, not necessarily reporting a bug, just hoping to help some future person figure out how to get the [literal] HTML attribute value with cheerio.

[Edit: To be clear, I’m not talking about using $node.val(). .va() does a lot of fancy logic to get what a human might think of as the ‘value’ of the node. See #451 talking about that a bit more. Here, I’m talking about the literal value of the value attribute.]