Question

I’m using jQuery to created a linked TOC that appears in a dialog box. The function I wrote to do so finds all the h4‘s in the page and

• gives them ids to link to
• adds some numbering display info
• clones them
• turns the clones into lis
• wraps the inner text in anchor tags
• finds the anchors adds a click function to the anchors to close the dialog
• adds titles and hrefs to the anchors so the links point to the original h4s
• goes back to the lis
• appends the lis to a ol the in dialog div

However, in IE7, the cloned h4s are not getting turned in lis. Works in FireFox. In IE7, everything happens as it does in FireFox, just that the the .replaceWith() is seemingly ignore… why?

Looks like this:

$('#content h4').each(function(index) {
   index = index + 1;
    $(this)
   .attr('id', 'tutorial_' + index)
   .before(function() {
            return '<div class="how_to">HOW TO<div><span>' + index + '</span></div></div>';
        })
  .clone()
  .replaceWith("<li>" + $(this).text() + "</li>")
  .wrapInner("<a></a>")
  .find('a')
    .click(function(){
        $("#dialog").dialog("close");
    })
    .attr({
        'title': 'jump to ' + $(this).text(),
        'href': '#tutorial_' + index
    })
   .end()
  .appendTo('#dialog ol')
 });

In action at: http://f1shw1ck.com/jquery_sandbox/tutorials.html

Answer 1

I don’t really understand why people love so much cloning… 🙂

I would do something like

$('#content h4').each(function(index) {
   index = index + 1;
    $(this)
   .attr('id', 'tutorial_' + index)
   .before(function() {
            return '<div class="how_to">HOW TO<div><span>' + index + '</span></div></div>';
        })
  .clone()
  .html("<li>" + $(this).text() + "</li>")
  .wrapInner("<a></a>")
  .find('a')
    .click(function(){
        $("#dialog").dialog("close");
    })
    .attr({
        'title': 'jump to ' + $(this).text(),
        'href': '#tutorial_' + index
    })
   .end()
  .appendTo('#dialog ol')
 });

But that’s just me 🙂

EDIT: After reading “a lot” about replaceWith() – there seems to be unresolved bug with IE7 & IE6 since… forever. So I discarded my function, took yours and replaced replaceWith with html – which works in this case the way you want, i.e. replace item’s html and return itself.

As for replaceWith, you probably ran into one of web vs. IE7 bugs 😉