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Asked: 2026-05-29T05:40:17+00:00

I am being passed html as a string. My goal is to create a

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I am being passed html as a string. My goal is to create a new document from the html that has all the appropriate nodes so that I can do things like call doc.getElementsByTagName on the doc I create and have it work as expected. An example of my code is here.

var doc = window.document.implementation.createDocument
    ('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'html',  null);
doc.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML =
      '<head><script>somejs</script>' +
      '<script>var x = 5; var y = 2; var foo = x + y;</script>' +
      '</head><body></body>';
var scripts = doc.getElementsByTagName('script');
console.log(scripts[0] + " code = " + scripts[0].innerHTML);

I am having the following issues:

  1. If something inside a script tag contains a character like < (eg in the example above in the “var foo = x + y;” statement change the + to a < symbol), I get an INVALID_STATE_ERR: DOM Exception 11.
  2. Even if nothing inside the script tag uses such characters, when I run the above I get the output “[object Element] code =undefined”

So my questions are:

A. How do I handle characters such as < that give DOM Exception 11 when I try to use them in whatever I am setting the innerHTML to
B. How do I make the document properly parse the script tags and put their code into their innerHTML attribute so that I can later read it.

EDIT: As Ryan P pointed out this code actually works in FF. So if anyone could help me get it working in chrome that would be much appreciated!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A. You need to convert any < to an HTML entity (&lt;). The rules don’t cease to apply just cause you’re in a script tag.

    B. You call your variable ‘doc’ but try to get the script tags from an undefined variable ‘tempDoc’. When I run your code in my browser after changing that variable, it all seems to work fine.

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