turn lump of text into a parseable document

[james.kingston@gmail.com]

In my first experimentation with js, I'm writing a greasemonkey script
which adds links to a page which, when clicked, will replace their
parent element with the contents of an element from another URL.

in the following function, pageHTML contains the entire text of an HTML
page, pulled in via GM_xmlhttpreque st. The page contains a ul with
id="commentlist ing". What I want to do, but can't seem to do, is turn
that lump of html in the pageHTML variable into a document that I can
run document.evalua te and document.getEle mentById on, just like I can
on the original page.

The second catch below alerts me with "TypeError:
tempnode.getEle mentById is not a function"


function getExpandedHTML (oldid, pageHTML)
{
GM_log("getExpa nded started");
var tempNode;
try {
tempnode = document.create Element("docume nt");
tempnode.innerH TML = pageHTML;
}
catch (e)
{
alert(e);
}
var listnode;
try {
listnode = tempnode.getEle mentById("comme ntlisting");
} catch (e)
{
alert(e);
}
//var innerlinks = listnode.evalua te("//a[@href]", listnode,
null, XPathResult.UNO RDERED_NODE_SNA PSHOT_TYPE, null);
//addlinkevenets( oldid, innerlinks);

GM_log("getExpa nded finished");
return listnode.innerH TML;
}

[Martin Honnen]

Re: turn lump of text into a parseable document



james.kingston@ gmail.com wrote:

[color=blue]
> The second catch below alerts me with "TypeError:
> tempnode.getEle mentById is not a function"
>
>
> function getExpandedHTML (oldid, pageHTML)
> {
> GM_log("getExpa nded started");
> var tempNode;
> try {
> tempnode = document.create Element("docume nt");
> tempnode.innerH TML = pageHTML;[/color]

You are creating an _element_ node and set its innerHTML, you are not
creating a _document_ node. Thus that
[color=blue]
> listnode = tempnode.getEle mentById("comme ntlisting");[/color]

fails as only document nodes implement the method getElementById.

As far as I know currently browsers like Mozilla or Opera do not provide
an API to script to parse some string with HTML markup into an HTML
document so you might need to help yourself with creating an iframe and
writing the markup in there. But that will then for instance load images
or other stuff in the HTML so it is not an in memory operation.




--

Martin Honnen

http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/