Question

I had a quick question regarding RegEx…

I have a string that looks something like the following:

"This was written by <p id="auth">John Doe</p> today!"

What I want to do (with javascript) is basically extract out the ‘John Doe’ from any tag with the ID of “auth”.

Could anyone shed some light? I’m sorry to ask.

Full story:
I am using an XML parser to pass data into variables from a feed. However, there is one tag in the XML document () that contains HTML passed into a string. It looks something like this:

 <item>
  <title>This is a title</title>
  <description>
  "By <p id="auth">John Doe</p> text text text... so on"
  </description>
 </item>

So as you can see, I can’t use an HTML/XML parser for that p tag, because it’s in a string, not a document.

Answer 1

Here’s a way to get the browser to do the HTML parsing for you:

var string = "This was written by <p id=\"auth\">John Doe</p> today!";

var div = document.createElement("div");

div.innerHTML = string; // get the browser to parse the html

var children = div.getElementsByTagName("*");

for (var i = 0; i < children.length; i++)
{
    if (children[i].id == "auth")
    {
        alert(children[i].textContent);
    }
}

If you use a library like jQuery, you could hide the for loop and replace the use of textContent with something cross-browser.