How to correctly use innerHTML to create an element (with possible children) from a html string?
Note: I do NOT want to use any framework.
The goal is just to create a function that will return an element based on an HTML string.
Assume a simple HTML Document like such:
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
All functions mentioned are in included the head section and all DOM creation/manipulation is done at the end of the body in a script tag.
I have a function createElement that takes a well formed HTML String as an argument. It goes like this:
function createElement(str)
{
var div = document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML = str;
return div.childNodes;
}
Now this functions works great when you call it like such:
var e = createElement('<p id="myId" class="myClass">myInnerHTML</p>');
With the minor (possibly HUGE) problem that the element created isn't a 'true' element, it still has a parentNode of 'div'. If anyone knows how to fix that, then that would be awesome.
Now if I call the same function with a more complex string:
var e = createElement('<p id="myId" class="myClass">innerHTML<h2 id="h2ID" class="h2CLASS">Heading2</h2></p>');
It creates TWO children instead of ONE child with another child having another child.
Once you do div.innerHTML = str. The innerHTML instead of
`<p id="myId" class="myClass">innerHTML <h2 id="h2ID" class="h2CLASS">Heading2</h2> </p>`
turns to
`<p id="myId" class="myClass">innerHTML</p> <h2 id="h2ID" class="h2CLASS">Heading2</h2>`
Questions:
- Can I somehow get an element without a parent node after using .innerHTML?
- Can I (in the case of the slightly complex string) get my function to return ONE element with the appropriate child instead of two elements. [It actually returns three,
<p.myClass#myId>,<h2.h2CLASS#h2ID>, and another<p>]
Answer
This is similar to the answer from palswim, except that it doesn't bother with creating a clone, and uses a while() loop instead, always appending the node at [0].
function createElement( str ) {
var frag = document.createDocumentFragment();
var elem = document.createElement('div');
elem.innerHTML = str;
while (elem.childNodes[0]) {
frag.appendChild(elem.childNodes[0]);
}
return frag;
}