Question

I am trying to change the HTML tag and remove the class/style attributes after the tag.
I already know how to do this if I create the code before hand and replace, now I want to know how to find the tags on an already loaded page and replace them with my js.

var s = "<h2 class=\"title\" style=\"font-color: red;\">Blog Post</h2>";
s = s.replace("<h2 class=\"title\" style=\"font-color: red;\">","<p>");
s = s.replace(/<\/h2>/g, "</p>");

Start with
<h2 class="title" style="font-color: red;">Blog Post</h2>

End with
<p>Blog Post</p>

So the question is how can I create the var s with existing HTML?
How do I find h2.title on a page and give it to var s?

edit I have no javascript experience except for this script which I found and tweaked.
Please explain how I can grab text from an existing document, and make it my var for s.replace to manipulate.

Answer 1

Don’t try to do it with regular expressions, you should use DOM manipulation to move the text node in question to a p tag you create. Here’s some code that will do what you need.

http://jsfiddle.net/jWRh5/

// Find the h2
var h2 = document.querySelector("h2");
// Create the p element you need
var p = document.createElement("p");
// Move the text node into the p element
p.appendChild(h2.firstChild);
// Insert the p element before the h2
h2.parentNode.insertBefore(p, h2);
// Get rid of the h2
h2.parentNode.removeChild(h2);

If you want to go against what every one else suggests, here’s a way to use RegExp to achieve what you need http://jsfiddle.net/jWRh5/1/

It uses a not well supported feature, outerHTML (it does work in most recent versions of the major browsers)

var h2 = document.querySelector("h2.title");
var s = h2.outerHTML;
s = s.replace("<h2 class=\"title\" style=\"font-color: red;\">","<p>");
s = s.replace(/<\/h2>/g, "</p>");
h2.outerHTML = s;

Here’s how to do it for all h2.titles on your page (not using the RegExp way since that’s a really poor way, but if you’re really set on using it, you can use it as a guide)

var h2s = document.querySelectorAll("h2.title");
// Loop backwards since we're modifying the list
for (var i = h2s.length -1 ; i >=0; i--) {
    var h2 = h2s[i];
    var p = document.createElement("p");
    p.appendChild(h2.firstChild);
    h2.parentNode.insertBefore(p, h2);
    h2.parentNode.removeChild(h2);
}