Get entire text of document as a string using javascript

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+1 Q:

Get entire text of document as a string using javascript

I am developing a firefox extension and ideally would be able to get the whole darn DOM as a string.. forget any data structure. I just want what I see in "view source" in a buffer. I have been checking out javascript references and HTMLDocument etc. with no avail.

Ideally I would be able to write to this buffer as well (seems possible i.e. document.writeLn()) I wish there was a document.read()? Am I just a js noob?

How about document.body.innerHTML? If you need the head contents as well, you can also try document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].innerHTML and append the two.

levik 2010-04-02 07:55:38

`document` doesn't have `innerHTML` property (as least not for Firefox).

KennyTM 2010-04-02 07:56:47

I am not sure if this works in practice elsewhere, but I just tested it in the firefox ext and comes back as null.

Tom Dignan 2010-04-02 07:57:07

yes, yes - I mistyped. I meant document.body.innerHTML. I have now fixed it and added a suggestion for getting head content as well.

levik 2010-04-02 07:58:51

i tried that, it didn't work in the firefox extension. if you've had success with this please let me know

Tom Dignan 2010-04-02 07:59:56

@levik: Why not just use `document.documentElement.innerHTML` to grab the `<head>` and `<body>` together.

KennyTM 2010-04-02 08:01:58

maybe for others purposes.. just putting it out there that i've tried that as well. I realize that was not directed at me

Tom Dignan 2010-04-02 08:04:56

Please note that doing a string replace on this and then putting the HTML back will be both distracting and destructive. When you do this, you'll lose properties and event handlers that were set by script.

Matti Virkkunen 2010-04-02 08:06:43

What if the search/replace operation needs to look for the words `span` or `head`? To protect against damage like that, you'd have to parse the HTML anyway. So traverse the DOM instead.

Daniel Earwicker 2010-04-02 08:16:29

+1 A:

Maybe you want to traverse all the nodes of the DOM? You can do this with document.childNodes, working recursively with each node.

Kinopiko 2010-04-02 07:59:23

this could be a good ideaI will try it now

Tom Dignan 2010-04-02 08:00:18

this worked, thanks a billion man.

Tom Dignan 2010-04-02 08:24:39

Not sure if you can load jQuery from a FF extension but -

This came up just the other day as a jQuery question. You can use the jQuery selector $('*').html() to get all the html without the 'html' tags.

James Westgate 2010-04-02 08:25:29

ansaurus

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Get entire text of document as a string using javascript

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