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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-19T03:07:25+00:00

I wanted to remove a element from a copy of the main DOM however

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I wanted to remove a element from a copy of the main DOM however i cannot get it to work.

Basically i am trying to remove the h2 element from the duplicate DOM and return the modified code in an alert however with whatever i have tried so far i just get the original DOM still.

<html>
<head>

</head>

<body>

<h2>Test</h2>

<script type="text/javascript" id="CustomScript">

    var Page = document.documentElement;
    var TempPage = document.documentElement;

    TempPage.removeChild("h2"); // Remove Not working
    TempPage.getElementById("h2").innerHTML = ""; // Remove Not working

</script>

<input type="button" value="Get Pages Code" onclick="alert(TempPage.innerHTML)">

</body>
</html>

If possible i would rather not use jQuery or YUI etc and just want to use regular Javascript.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are two parts to your question and you are doing them both incorrectly.

    1. TempPage is the same object as Page. Assignment to a different variable does not make a copy–it just lets you access the same object via another name. You need to explicitly create a copy.
    2. Your attempts to get the h2 element are both incorrect.
      1. removeChild() won’t work because:
        1. It requires a Node object, not a string.
        2. documentElement is the <html> element, but the <h2> element is a child of <body>, not <html>.
      2. getElementById() won’t work because your <h2> element does not have an id attribute.

    How you would do this is:

    var TempPage = document.documentElement.cloneNode(true); // copy document
var h2 = TempPage.querySelector('h2'); // find h2 element
h2.parentNode.removeChild(h2);  // remove h2 element

    If querySelector is not available, this will be a much more tedious task but still possible using normal DOM manipulation. You really need to learn about DOM manipulation

    However from your complete code I can’t fathom why you would need to clone the page. Just do this:

    function textContent(node) {
    return node.textContent || node.innerText || '';
}
var h2 = document.getElementsByTagName('h2')[0];
var h2Text = textContent(h2);
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