Question

Ok, people, I need your help. I’ve found some code here on Stackoverflow (can’t find that link) which generate HTML code dynamically via JS. Here is code:

function create(htmlStr) {
    var frag = document.createDocumentFragment(),
        temp = document.createElement('div');
    temp.innerHTML = htmlStr;
    while (temp.firstChild) {
        frag.appendChild(temp.firstChild);
      }
        return frag;
    }

    var fragment = create('<div class="someclass"><a href="www.example.com"><p>some text</p></a></div>'); 

    document.body.insertBefore(fragment, document.body.childNodes[0]);

This code works just fine! But the generated code appears on top of page, right below body tag. I would like to generate that code inside empty div with specific id="generate-here".

So output will be:

<div id="generate-here">
    <!-- Here is generated content -->
</div>

I know that I can’t see generated content with “view source”. I only need to generate that content just in this particular place with #generate-here. I’m Javascript noob, so if anyone can just rearrange this code that will be perfect. Thanks a lot!

P.S. I know how to do this with Jquery, but I need native and pure JavaScript in this case.

Answer 1

All you need to do is change the last line. This will add the created element as the last child of the div:

document.getElementById("generate-here").appendChild(fragment);     

This will add the created element as the first child of the div:

var generateHere = document.getElementById("generate-here");
generateHere.insertBefore(fragment, generateHere.firstChild);

You can also use innerHTML to just replace everything with new text (as you do in your create function). Obviously this one doesn’t require you to keep the create function because you need an html string instead of a DOM object.

var generateHere = document.getElementById("generate-here");
generateHere.innerHTML = '<div class="someclass"><a href="www.example.com"><p>some text</p></a></div>';