How to convert a HTMLElement to a string

Javascript Problem Overview

I am going to create an XML element in JavaScript to exchange data with server side. I found I can do it with document.createElement. But I do not know how to convert it to string. Is there any API in browser to make it easier? Or is there any JS library including this API?

EDIT: I found that browser API XMLSerializer, it should be the right way to serialize to string.

Javascript Solutions

Solution 1 - Javascript

The element outerHTML property (note: supported by Firefox after version 11) returns the HTML of the entire element.

Example

<div id="new-element-1">Hello world.</div>

<script type="text/javascript"><!--

var element = document.getElementById("new-element-1");
var elementHtml = element.outerHTML;
// <div id="new-element-1">Hello world.</div>

--></script>

Similarly, you can use innerHTML to get the HTML contained within a given element, or innerText to get the text inside an element (sans HTML markup).

Solution 2 - Javascript

You can get the 'outer-html' by cloning the element, adding it to an empty,'offstage' container, and reading the container's innerHTML.

This example takes an optional second parameter.

Call document.getHTML(element, true) to include the element's descendents.

document.getHTML= function(who, deep){
	if(!who || !who.tagName) return '';
	var txt, ax, el= document.createElement("div");
	el.appendChild(who.cloneNode(false));
	txt= el.innerHTML;
	if(deep){
		ax= txt.indexOf('>')+1;
		txt= txt.substring(0, ax)+who.innerHTML+ txt.substring(ax);
	}
	el= null;
	return txt;
}

Solution 3 - Javascript

There's a tagName property, and a attributes property as well:

var element = document.getElementById("wtv");
var openTag = "<"+element.tagName;
for (var i = 0; i < element.attributes.length; i++) {
    var attrib = element.attributes[i];
    openTag += " "+attrib.name + "=" + attrib.value;
}
openTag += ">";
alert(openTag);

To get the contents between the open and close tags you could probably use innerHTML if you don't want to iterate over all the child elements...

alert(element.innerHTML);

... and then get the close tag again with tagName.

var closeTag = "</"+element.tagName+">";
alert(closeTag);

Solution 4 - Javascript

Suppose your element is entire [object HTMLDocument]. You can convert it to a String this way:

const htmlTemplate = `<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><head></head><body></body></html>`;

const domparser = new DOMParser();
const doc = domparser.parseFromString(htmlTemplate, "text/html"); // [object HTMLDocument]

const doctype = '<!DOCTYPE html>';
const html = doc.documentElement.outerHTML;

console.log(doctype + html);

Solution 5 - Javascript

The most easy way to do is copy innerHTML of that element to tmp variable and make it empty, then append new element, and after that copy back tmp variable to it. Here is an example I used to add jquery script to top of head.

var imported = document.createElement('script');
imported.src = 'http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.js';
var tmpHead = document.head.innerHTML;
document.head.innerHTML = "";
document.head.append(imported);
document.head.innerHTML += tmpHead;

That simple :)

Solution 6 - Javascript

This might not apply to everyone's case, but when extracting from xml I had this problem, which I solved with this.

function grab_xml(what){
var return_xml =null;
	$.ajax({
                type: "GET",
                url: what,
                success:function(xml){return_xml =xml;},
		async:   false
        });
return(return_xml);
}

then get the xml:

var sector_xml=grab_xml("p/sector.xml");
var tt=$(sector_xml).find("pt");

Then I then made this function to extract xml line , when i need to read from an XML file, containing html tags.

    function extract_xml_line(who){
    var tmp = document.createElement("div");
    tmp.appendChild(who[0]);
    var tmp=$(tmp.innerHTML).html();
    return(tmp);
}

and now to conclude:

var str_of_html= extract_xml_line(tt.find("intro")); //outputs the intro tag and whats inside it: helllo  <b>in bold</b>

Solution 7 - Javascript

I was using Angular, and needed the same thing, and landed at this post.

@ViewChild('myHTML', {static: false}) _html: ElementRef;
this._html.nativeElement;

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	xiao 啸	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Javascript	gpmcadam	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Javascript	kennebec	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Javascript	Richard JP Le Guen	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Javascript	topvova	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Javascript	Navid Sheikh	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Javascript	Miguel	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Javascript	Jnr	View Answer on Stackoverflow