Replace a textNode with HTML text in Javascript?

23
votes

I was directed to the Linkify project on GitHub (https://github.com/cowboy/javascript-linkify) for finding and "linkifying" URLs and domains just floating in text.

It's awesome! It totally works on text!

However, I'm not quite sure how to make it work on a textNode which has the text I want to Linkify.

I understand the textNode only has textContent since.. it's all text. Since this Linkify function returns HTML as text, is there a way to take a textNode and "rewrite" the HTML within it with the Linkify output?

I've been playing with it on JSFiddle here: http://jsfiddle.net/AMhRK/9/

function repl(node) {
  var nodes = node.childNodes;
  for (var i = 0, m = nodes.length; i < m; i++) {
    var n = nodes[i];
    if (n.nodeType == n.TEXT_NODE) {
      // do some swappy text to html here?
      n.textContent = linkify(n.textContent);
    } else {
      repl(n);
    }
  }
}
2
javascripthtmltextnode
Your example code is so messy and so much, I don't even know where to begin! Can you clean it up a little bit, and just have a normal example, and the one you want with textNode? – Hanlet Escaño
jsfiddle.net/AMhRK/4 – Ryan
@ryan it's close but you see it mangles the already properly hyperlinked URLs. – Jippers
@HanletEscaño here's a "cleaned up" fiddle jsfiddle.net/AMhRK/6 – Jippers
@Jippers did you try ryan's jsFiddle? It actually works. – Hanlet Escaño

2 Answers

22
votes

You'll need to replace the textNode with an HTML element, like a span, and then set your linkified-text as that element's innerHTML.

var replacementNode = document.createElement('span');
replacementNode.innerHTML = linkify(n.textContent);
n.parentNode.insertBefore(replacementNode, n);
n.parentNode.removeChild(n);
8
votes

Additionally to previous answer I propose more short way (based on jQuery):

$(n).replaceWith('Some text with <b>html</b> support');

where n - is textNode.

Or the native version

var txt = document.createElement("span");
txt.innerHTML = "Some text with <b>html</b> support";
node.replaceWith(txt);

where node is the textNode