A little smirk
One day a secretary is leaving on her lunch break, and she notices her boss standing in front of a shredder with a clueless look on his face. The secretary walks up to him and asks if he needs help.
"Yes!" he says looking and sounding relieved, "This is very important."
Glad to help, she turns the shredder on and inserts the paper. Then her boss says, "Thanks, I only need one copy."
Create function like innerText
As you may have figured out innerText is IE only. That means that browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape will return undefined. If you do not know what innerText does, it strips out all of the tags so you only see the text.
For example, if a div contains the HTML <span id='span1'>Eric</span>, innerHTML would return <span id='span1'>Eric</span> while innerText will return Eric.
Now to make innerHTML act the same we need to use some regular expressions with the strings replace() method.
Now the basic pattern we need to match is
Now the regular expression we need to use is /<\/?[^>]+>/gi
If you do not know regular expressions here is a quick explanation:
So now the function to replace the text would look like:
<script type="text/javascript">
var regExp = /<\/?[^>]+>/gi;
function ReplaceTags(xStr){
xStr = xStr.replace(regExp,"");
return xStr;
}
</script>
All you need to do is pass it a string and it returns the string stripped of the tags.
An example is shown below to grab the text from a div without the tags.
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
var regExp = /<\/?[^>]+>/gi;
function ReplaceTags(xStr){
xStr = xStr.replace(regExp,"");
return xStr;
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="test">
<span id="span1">Test <u><b>Test</b></u> Test <br/><a href="#">Wow</a>!</span>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var xContent = document.getElementById("test").innerHTML;
var fixedContent = ReplaceTags(xContent);
alert(fixedContent);
</script>
</body>
</html>
Hope this helps
Eric Pascarello
Moderator of HTML/JavaScript at www.JavaRanch.com
Author of: JavaScript: Your Visual Blueprint for Dynamic Web Pages
Eric