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innerHTML removes attribute quotes in Internet Explorer

When you get the innerHTML of a DOM node in IE, if there are no spaces in an attribute value, IE will remove the quotes around it, as demonstrated below:

<html>
    <head>
        <title></title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="div1"><div id="div2"></div></div>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            alert(document.getElementById("div1").innerHTML);
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

In IE, the alert will read:

<DIV id=div2></DIV>

This is a problem, because I am passing this on to a processor that requires valid XHTML, and all attribute values must be quoted. Does anyone know of an easy way to work around this behavior in IE?

like image 694
Augustus Avatar asked Aug 05 '09 07:08

Augustus


2 Answers

IE innerHTML is very annoying indeed. I wrote this function for it, which may be helpfull? It quotes attributes and sets tagnames to lowercase. By the way, to make it even more annoying, IE's innerHTML doesn't remove quotes from non standard attributes.

Edit based on comments The function now processes more characters in attribute values and optionally converts attribute values to lower case. The function looks even more ugly now ;~). If you want to add or remove characters to the equation, edit the [a-zA-Z\.\:\[\]_\(\)\&\$\%#\@\!0-9]+[?\s+|?>] part of the regular expressions.

function ieInnerHTML(obj, convertToLowerCase) {
    var zz = obj.innerHTML ? String(obj.innerHTML) : obj
       ,z  = zz.match(/(<.+[^>])/g);    

    if (z) {
     for ( var i=0;i<z.length;(i=i+1) ){
      var y
         ,zSaved = z[i]
         ,attrRE = /\=[a-zA-Z\.\:\[\]_\(\)\&\$\%#\@\!0-9\/]+[?\s+|?>]/g
      ;

      z[i] = z[i]
              .replace(/([<|<\/].+?\w+).+[^>]/,
                 function(a){return a.toLowerCase();
               });
      y = z[i].match(attrRE);

      if (y){
        var j   = 0
           ,len = y.length
        while(j<len){
          var replaceRE = 
               /(\=)([a-zA-Z\.\:\[\]_\(\)\&\$\%#\@\!0-9\/]+)?([\s+|?>])/g
             ,replacer  = function(){
                  var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);
                  return '="'+(convertToLowerCase 
                          ? args[2].toLowerCase() 
                          : args[2])+'"'+args[3];
                };
          z[i] = z[i].replace(y[j],y[j].replace(replaceRE,replacer));
          j+=1;
        }
       }
       zz = zz.replace(zSaved,z[i]);
     }
   }
  return zz;
}

Example key-value pairs that should work

data-mydata=return[somevalue] => data-mydata="return[somevalue]"
id=DEBUGGED:true => id="DEBUGGED:true" (or id="debugged:true" if you use the convertToLowerCase parameter)
someAttribute=Any.Thing.Goes => someAttribute="Any.Thing.Goes"
like image 165
KooiInc Avatar answered Oct 11 '22 15:10

KooiInc


Ah, the joy of trying to use XHTML in a browser that doesn't support it.

I'd just accept that you are going to get HTML back from the browser and put something in front of your XML processor that can input tag soup and output XHTML — HTML Tidy for example.

like image 31
Quentin Avatar answered Oct 11 '22 13:10

Quentin