Alternative for innerHTML?

Question

EDIT: WOW. This question is 12 years old now.

As someone stated, it can be done with a one-liner since 2016: https://stackoverflow.com/a/69322509/80907

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The original:

I'm wondering if there's a way to change the text of anything in HTML without using innerHTML.

Reason I'm asking is because it's kinda frowned upon by the W3C. I know it's nitpicking, but I just wanna know, is there a way?

EDIT: people seem to misunderstand what I'm asking here: I want to find a way to effectivly change the text being displayed.

If I have:

<div id="one">One</a>

innerHTML allows me to do this:

var text = document.getElementsById("one");
text.innerHTML = "Two";

And the text on my screen will have changed.
I do not wish to append more text, I wish to change allready existing text.

Answer 1

The recommended way is through DOM manipulation, but it can be quite verbose. For example:

// <p>Hello, <b>World</b>!</p>
var para = document.createElement('p');
para.appendChild(document.createTextNode('Hello, '));

// <b>
var b = document.createElement('b');
b.appendChild(document.createTextNode('World');
para.appendChild(b);

para.appendChild(document.createTextNode('!'));

// Do something with the para element, add it to the document, etc.

EDIT

In response to your edit, in order to replace the current content, you simply remove the existing content, then use the code above to fill in new content. For example:

var someDiv = document.getElementById('someID');
var children = someDiv.childNodes;
for(var i = 0; i < children.length; i++)
    someDiv.removeChild(children[i]);

But as someone else said, I'd recommend using something like jQuery instead, as not all browsers fully support DOM, and those that do have quirks which are dealt with internally by JavaScript libraries. For example, jQuery looks something like this:

$('#someID').html("<p>Hello, <b>World</b>!</p>");

Answer 2

The better way of doing it is to use document.createTextNode. One of the main reasons for using this function instead of innerHTML is that all HTML character escaping will be taken care of for you whereas you would have to escape your string yourself if you were simply setting innerHTML.

Answer 3

You can get the same effect by manipulating the DOM. The safest way to change text is to remove all the child nodes of the element and replace them with a new text node.

var node = document.getElementById("one");

while( node.firstChild )
    node.removeChild( node.firstChild );
node.appendChild( document.createTextNode("Two") );

Removing the child nodes gets rid of the text content of your element before replacing it with the new text.

The reason most developers avoid using innerHTML is that accessing elements through the DOM is standards compliant.

Answer 4

If you only want to change plain text, then there's a quicker solution that relies on standards:

document.getElementById("one").firstChild.data = "two";

Anyway, please note that innerHTML is going to be part of the upcoming HTML 5 standard.