Question

Possible Duplicate:
Executing <script> elements inserted with .innerHTML
Dynamically Inserting <script> tags into HTML on Page Load

What I mean is that if I do .innerHTML write that contains

<script type="text/javascript" src="source.js"></script>

or

<script type="text/javascript"> // embedded code here </script>

The embedded code does not run and neither does the linked to code. It is “dead”.

Is there a way to manually trigger it?

Answer 1

you need to add the javascript to the head tag,
i.e

var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];         
var newScript = document.createElement('script');
newScript.type = 'text/javascript';
newScript.src = 'http://www.somedomain.com/somescript.js';
head.appendChild(newScript);

(this is a quite common thing, but i copied the code from here: http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Howto_Dynamically_Insert_Javascript_And_CSS )

---

on a side note:
if you use jQuery you will be tempted to write the following:

<script>
    [....]
    $( "head" ).append( "<script src='myScript.js'></script>" ); 
    [....]
</script>

note that this doesn’t work because the javascript parser will see the first </script> and stop parsing right there.