innerHTML: How To Avoid

Question

I\'m writing a plugin which will convert emoticons to images in a text block for a particular site. The easy answer is to use regular expressions to detect the trigger text

Answer 1

This is the same issue I have to obtain the full review on my Addon (ImageZone).

I think is not a good idea for you to use innerHTML, since you will lost all event listeners registered on the targets node. I think you could use a code like this:

var treeWalker = document.createTreeWalker(
 node,
 NodeFilter.SHOW_ALL,
 { acceptNode:function (node) {
         return node.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE ? 
                  NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT : NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
 }},false);

 or just

var treeWalker = document.createTreeWalker(
 node,
 NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
 { acceptNode:function (node) {return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT; }},false);

 while(treeWalker.nextNode()) {
     var n=walker.currentNode;
     var text=n.nodeValue;
     var a= text.split(/(--- your emoticon regexp code ---))/g);
     if (a.length > 1){
         n.insertAfter(document.createTextNode(a[0]));
         var img=document.createElement("img");
         switch (a[1]){
             case '...': img.setAttribute('src','...'); break;
         } 
         // or img.setAttribute('src',emos_srcs[a[1]]);

         n.insertAfter(img);
         n.insertAfter(document.createTextNode(a[2]));
         n.parentNode.removeChild(n);
     }

 }