Detect click outside div using javascript

Question

I'd like to detect a click inside or outside a div area. The tricky part is that the div will contain other elements and if one of the elements inside the div is clicked, it should be considered a click inside, the same way if an element from outside the div is clicked, it should be considered an outside click.

I've been researching a lot but all I could find were examples in jquery and I need pure javascript.

Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Answer 1

It depends on the individual use case but it sounds like in this example there are likely to be other nested elements inside the main div e.g. more divs, lists etc. Using Node.contains would be a useful way to check whether the target element is within the div that is being checked.

window.addEventListener('click', function(e){   
  if (document.getElementById('clickbox').contains(e.target)){
    // Clicked in box
  } else{
    // Clicked outside the box
  }
});

An example that has a nested list inside is here.