Find html label associated with a given input

First, scan the page for labels, and assign a reference to the label from the actual form element:

var labels = document.getElementsByTagName('LABEL');
for (var i = 0; i < labels.length; i++) {
    if (labels[i].htmlFor != '') {
         var elem = document.getElementById(labels[i].htmlFor);
         if (elem)
            elem.label = labels[i];         
    }
}

Then, you can simply go:

document.getElementById('MyFormElem').label.innerHTML = 'Look ma this works!';

No need for a lookup array :)

If you are using jQuery you can do something like this

$('label[for="foo"]').hide ();

If you aren't using jQuery you'll have to search for the label. Here is a function that takes the element as an argument and returns the associated label

function findLableForControl(el) {
   var idVal = el.id;
   labels = document.getElementsByTagName('label');
   for( var i = 0; i < labels.length; i++ ) {
      if (labels[i].htmlFor == idVal)
           return labels[i];
   }
}