Comments on: Like innerHTML, except not as broken

By: TJ Maciak

TJ Maciak — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:14:28 +0000

good thing I proof read. The tag I was talking about is & nbsp; (put together - otherwise your comments render it as a space - as it should!)

By: TJ Maciak

TJ Maciak — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:13:00 +0000

Hey this is really cool and works pretty good. I was having major problems/headaches with IE returning upper case tags and one-name attributes like id=oneName instead of being like id=”oneName” when I was using .innerHTML to obtain the contents of a div so that I could send it on to iText using xhtml to make a PDF. The one problem I have encountered is that your code does something strange with the tag when using it in IE (6 & 7). I ended up solving this strangeness by doing a pre-parse on the code that I send to your parseNode function and that fixed the problem using this syntax: document.getElementById(divID).innerHTML = document.getElementById(divID).innerHTML.replaceAll(” ”,’ ‘);

If I didn’t do the preparse then the xhtml reader would tell me that the string I was sending to it (the text returning from parseNode) was invalid with the following output: com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.io.MalformedByteSequenceException: Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence.

Other than that this will help a lot of people out who have to deal with IE (thankfully Firefox handles the innerHTML beautifully sending xhtml compliant lower case tags)! If you have further questions about the problem I ran into feel free to contact me via email and I will be happy to help test it out more. Thanks again for offering this up as it is a time & headache saver.

By: Eric Stern

Eric Stern — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:36:21 +0000

Hi James, I just stumbled across this after some serious headaches caused by this problem with innerHTML and needed to give you a huge thanks as this immediately fixed the issue! I’ve been using jQuery with AJAX to build out a form on the fly and then save it to the server and the innerHTML (which jQuery.html() uses) was getting messed up along the way. I filed a bug report over there and pointed them towards this post for a fix Thanks again for posting up this solution! Eric

By: jamesv

jamesv — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:20:44 +0000

Sure, grab the latest version - DOM -> XHTML string parser - v0.2

and call it like:

    parseNode(target_node, true); // The second param is for an "omit_outer_node" flag

Should work how you need it now. Shoot me a link once you get your project up and running.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:42:02 +0000

Thanks for this! Been looking for something like this for a while…..however. Is there any way to remove the surrounding div tags, like innerHTML would do? I’m looking for innerHTML “content” but with proper HTML tags (lower case and self closing /).

Thanks!