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Asked: 2026-05-27T20:02:19+00:00

Here is the thing, I have a textarea (with ID input_container) full of HTML

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Here is the thing,

I have a textarea (with ID “input_container”) full of HTML code, the simple example is:

<!doctype html>
<html>
    <head></head>
    <body>
        <a href="www.example.com">the other place</a>
    </body>
</html>

I parsed it using jQuery, here is my code:

I have all this HTML string into variable named domString like this:

domString = $('#input_container').val();

To get a parse HTML of everything inside variable domString, I had to wrap it with another tag, so I did:

dom = "<allhtml>" + domString + "</allhtml>";

And got everything inside a jQuery selector to be parsed:

dDom = $(dom);

After that I checked what’s in dDom, so I did

alert(dDom.html());

That should give me anything inside the tags, right?

But unfortunately, all I get is:

<a href="www.example.com">the other place</a>

And all the other tags are mysteriously gone. Can anyone explain this phenomenon and tell me how to really parse all the DOM?

Thank you

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From the jQuery documentation:

    When passing in complex HTML, some browsers may not generate a DOM
    that exactly replicates the HTML source provided. As mentioned, we use
    the browser’s .innerHTML property to parse the passed HTML and insert
    it into the current document. During this process, some browsers
    filter out certain elements such as <html>, <title>, or <head>
    elements. As a result, the elements inserted may not be representative
    of the original string passed.

    This should work instead:

    $('<html />').append($('<head />')).append($('<body />').append($('<a href="www.example.com">the other place</a>')));

    This is kind of a weird thing to do, though- you might want to think about other ways to do what you’re trying to accomplish, I worry that you might be suffering from the XY Problem.

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