What is the best way to parse (get a DOM tree of) a HTML result of XmlHttpRequest in Firefox?
EDIT:
I do not have the DOM tree, I want to acquire it.
XmlHttpRequest's "responseXML" works only when the result is actual XML, so I have only responseText to work with.
The innerHTML hack doesn't seem to work with a complete HTML document (in <html></html>). - turns out it works fine.
Loop up the responseXML property of the XMLHttpRequest object. Furthermore, if you use innerHTML to append the responseText of an HTML-formatted response, the browser will parse the text and assemble it within the DOM all before even appending it into the document flow.
When you say "DOM Tree" you've already accomplished "parsing" the data. DOM is a structure for data. If you figure out what DOM "looks like", you'll understand this.
If your data is XHTML, so it's valid XML, then DOMParser (Mozilla) or loadXML (IE) may help. If not, I can't think of anything better than stripping the and and then passing it to a 's innerHtml.
See 21.1.3 in Flanagan's Javascript guide (5th edition).
Colin
innerHTML should work just fine, e.g.
// This would be after the Ajax request:
var myHTML = XHR.responseText;
var tempDiv = document.createElement('div');
tempDiv.innerHTML = myHTML.replace(/<script(.|\s)*?\/script>/g, '');
// tempDiv now has a DOM structure:
tempDiv.childNodes;
tempDiv.getElementsByTagName('a'); // etc. etc.
Question for OP hmp and J-P: is it possible to use Ajax to GET a html file? How do you get HTML content in the response? Would it work to rename a html file as .txt?
Thanks!