Question

I will first explain what I’m trying to do then I will explain why just in case you get bored of reading the whole scenario.

Basically I have some HTML markup stored in a variable I now need to a wait to access the different elements within the variable. For example:

var markUp = "<h3>h3 tag</h3><p>paragraph tag</p>";

What I need to know is if there is a way for me to query the variable to retrieve say the h3 tag, in a similar way you would use the query function ? I have seen some other practices where people append the var to a hidden div then query the div. I would prefer to avoid this but if that is the only way I will proceed.

I have come across this problem whilst developing a drag and drop application, on drop i use a custom creator function to change the items structure once it is dropped.

If further explanation is needed please say, thanks advance Jonathan

Answer 1

You can use dojo._toDom to create a DOM fragment from your string.

var markup = "<h3>h3 tag</h3><p>paragraph tag</p><p>another paragraph</p>";
var domFragment = dojo._toDom(markup);

dojo.query("p", domFragment).forEach(function(element,i) {
    console.debug(element.innerHTML);
});

The underscore prefix in _toDom means that it’s a “private” member method of dojo. Normally, it’s bad practice to use these as if they were public (like I do here). However, in the case of _toDom I believe it’s generally considered acceptable, and according to this trac entry, it sounds like it’ll be made public in the next version.