Question

I am doing some manipulation of TextNodes in javascript, and I (unfortunately) need to support IE6. Node.normalize() is crashing, and I need to work around this. My first inclination is to just re-implement it using other DOM methods. How would I implement this?

Answer 1

The following version is shorter and more efficient than others posted here. The improvements are:

• No repeated calls to node.childNodes and node.childNodes.length
• No creation of extra text nodes; instead, for each merge, keep the first existing text node and use its appendData() method
• Shorter

The code:

function normalize(node) {
    var child = node.firstChild, nextChild;
    while (child) {
        if (child.nodeType == 3) {
            while ((nextChild = child.nextSibling) && nextChild.nodeType == 3) {
                child.appendData(nextChild.data);
                node.removeChild(nextChild);
            }
        } else {
            normalize(child);
        }
        child = child.nextSibling;
    }
}