add HTML to text node extracted via node.nodeValue

Question

I wanted to know if there\'s any way I could output HTML after extracting contents() and performing a replace on all of the text-nodes in it.

jsFiddle:

Answer 1

If I'm understanding you correctly, I believe this will do:

$('#msg').contents().each(function() {
    if(this.nodeType == 3) {
        var u = this.nodeValue;
        var reg = /_link_/g;
        $(this).replaceWith(u.replace(reg,'<a href="http://google.com">Google</a>'));
    }
});

http://jsfiddle.net/t8835/2/

Answer 2

Your problem is that you're inserting the HTML into a text node (and it's therefore being treated as text). Instead of replacing _link_ with <a href="http://google.com">Google</a>, you'd want to take the text node, remove the text from _link_ onward, append an HTML node (that contains the anchor) and put all of text after _link_ into a new text node following that.