Starting to implement Javascript, I need to do troubleshooting and would like to output HTML to the screen without it being rendered. I can access the element (in IE) by
document.getElementById(test).outerHTML
I think, but I can't prove what I'm getting to be sure.
So what do I do to have document.write show the entire element including tags?
Do two things (all of these, not just one):
HTML.replace(/&/g, '&').replace(/</g, '<') is enough.<pre></pre> tags so the whitespace is not eliminated and it is shown in a monospace font.You can also alert(HTML). In IE on Windows (at least) you can press Ctrl-C and paste the text contents of the dialog box elsewhere to see it plainly.
Two serial replaces is faster than using a function as the second argument of replace(). Three serial replaces is also faster when the string is very long as one might expect from a full HTML document.
Also, using document.write is probably not the best way. If you have a div with id output you can access it this way:
document.getElementById('output').innerHTML = '<pre>' + document.body.innerHTML.replace(/&/g, '&').replace(/</g, '<') + '</pre>';
The above code works, I tested it in IE and also in Firefox using FireBug. Note that outerHTML is not supported in Firefox.
