norfleet wrote:
[color=blue]
> OK, so let's say, for example, I have a bit of HTML that looks like
> this:
>
> <td class="regular1b" valign="top">
> <a href="notfound.html"><span class="list5"><b>Lecture
> V</b></span></a>
> </td>
>
> And I want to save all the text ("all" meaning the tags and
> everything) between the <td> and </td>. Using JavaScript, I was able
> to isolate the <td></td> by doing:
>
> var w = myTable.getElementsByTagName("TD");
>
> So then I have an IF statement within a FOR loop that looks like:
>
> if (w.item(i).className == "regular1b")[/color]
As you have seen, there is no need to call the item() method explicitely
when accessing the DOM with an ECMAScript implementation. Using the square
bracket property accessor syntax, that method or the namedItem() method
is called implicitely, depending on the type of the operand.
<http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-HTML/ecma-script-binding.html>
[color=blue]
> alert(w[i].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
>
> The ALERT() is just a place holder to make sure things are working.
> The thing is, nodeValue returns NULL because there's no actual text
> within the <td></td> tags;[/color]
It returns `null' (ECMAScript is case-sensitive) because the first child
node is an element node. This is documented and standards compliant
behavior. Think of the contents of the "td" element as a subtree where
nested content is a child node. Provided that the whitespace after the
start tag of the "td" element and before the start tag of the "a" element
is not considered a text node (proprietary behavior!), this subtree looks like
..
..
..
'- TD class="regular1b" valign="top"
| |
| '- A href="notfound.html"
| |
| '- SPAN class="list5"
| |
| '- B
| |
| '- TEXT "Lecture V"
|
|- ...
..
..
..
(The "Show parse tree" feature of the W3C Validator
<http://validator.w3.org/> provides a similar presentation.)
You see that childNodes[0] or firstChild refers to an element node.
Standard compliant parsing would result in
..
..
..
'- TD class="regular1b" valign="top"
| |
| |- TEXT "\n\t"
| |
| '- A HREF="notfound.html"
| |
| '- SPAN class="list5"
| |
| '- B
| |
| '- TEXT "Lecture V"
|
|- ...
..
..
..
so in Mozilla/5.0 (Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Firefox, Camino,
....) you get "\n\t" for childNodes[0].nodeValue.
That is why it was suggested to normalize the document, such as
<td class="regular1b" valign="top"><a
href="notfound.html"[color=blue]
><span class="list5"
><b>Lecture V</b></span></a></td>[/color]
[color=blue]
> the only thing there is more HTML code, and the text between the
> <span></span> apparently isn't considered part of the <td></td> tags.[/color]
That misconception is the main cause for your problem.
[color=blue]
> I guess I'm wondering if there's another way to go about getting the
> text from in between the <td></td> tags short of just doing a
> brute-force text search on the whole darn page. Any help would be
> much appreciated...[/color]
There is. The "innerHTML" property has been suggested. But since it is
proprietary, and you are using the standards compliant DOM, you should
rather serialize the subtree, traversing it. Depending on the UA's DOM,
there are predefined serializer objects, such as XMLSerializer in the
Gecko DOM. But you can code your own serializer as well.
PointedEars
