javascript - remove element/node with no ID and specific content

Question

I'm struggling to decipher a way to remove several specific href elements which contain no IDs and are children of individual parents with no IDs.

The best I can manage is identifying the four offending, out of 8 or 9 href tags (and the number may vary), by a specific word within the URL itself. For this, I do the following:

<script language=javascript>
var xx = document.getElementById('theID').getElementsByTagName('a');
var ptn=/\=media/;
for(var i=0; i<xx.length; i++) {
    if(ptn.exec(xx[i])){
    alert(xx[i]);
    }
}
</script>

Of course all this gives me is the four specific URLs within the href where "=media" is present. Now, somehow, I need to be able to remove either these href elements, or their parent elements (which happen to be unordered list tags). It's not until I get a level higher (table cell) that I gain access to an element ID, or anything distinguishing besides a particular word within the URL itself.

I'm open to any approach at this point - PHP may be an option (I really haven't explored this yet), but for this, javascript was my first logical choice. I can't tamper with the page that generates the links directly, only a secondary page which gets included at page load time.

Any pointers on how to solve this??

======================== final solution =====================

<script language=javascript>
var xx = document.getElementById('theID').getElementsByTagName('a');
var ptn=/\=media/;
for(var i=0; i<xx.length; i++) {
    while(ptn.exec(xx[i].href)){
        alert(xx[i]);
        xx[i].parentNode.removeChild(xx[i]);
    }
}
</script>

Answer 1

You don't need the ID to remove an element. You only need a reference to the element (which you seem to have).

instead of this:

alert(xx[i]);

try this:

XX[i].parentElement.removeChild(xx[i]);

Answer 2

You can call removeChild() on the parent element, like so:

xx[i].parentNode.removeChild(xx[i]);

As a side note, your regular expression isn't being executed on the href property. Change your if statement to:

if(ptn.exec(xx[i].href)){

Answer 3

var parent = xx[i].parentNode;
parent.removeChild(xx[i]);

http://www.onlinetools.org/articles/unobtrusivejavascript/chapter2.html has some nice examples of similar operations (scroll down).