Replace a textNode with HTML text in Javascript?

Question

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);
    }
  }
}

Answer 1

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);

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

Build on Will Scott's accepted answer, if you do not wish to have to wrap everything in a span, you could do the following:

const enhanceNodes = (textNodes) => {
    const renderNode = document.createElement('span');
    textNodes.forEach((node) => {
        const oldText = node.textContent;
        renderNode.innerHTML = fancyTextTranformation(oldText);
        node.replaceWith(...renderNode.childNodes);
    })
}

Answer 4

Build on @AlexJeffcott's answer: Perf optimized version utilizing DocumentFragment instead of messing around with <span>, innerHTML and childNodes😁

const enhanceNodes = (textNodes) => {
    textNodes.forEach((node) => {
        const oldText = node.textContent;
        const newText = fancyTextTranformation(oldText);
        const fragment = document.createRange().createContextualFragment(newText);
        node.replaceWith(fragment);
    })
}