finding text on webpage

doug s · Sep 11, 2005

How would I access the source of a webpage? I would like to get the source,
then use a regexp to find text on a webpage. For example, retrieving a
counter, or some other text that dynamically changes. I'm implementing this
for firefox.

right now, i have a web page opening that contains that info, but i would
rather have a pop up alert() that shows that info.

thanks for any help. and any code snippets would be great.

RobG · Sep 12, 2005

doug said:
How would I access the source of a webpage? I would like to get the source,
then use a regexp to find text on a webpage. For example, retrieving a
counter, or some other text that dynamically changes. I'm implementing this
for firefox.

right now, i have a web page opening that contains that info, but i would
rather have a pop up alert() that shows that info.

thanks for any help. and any code snippets would be great.

There are at least three ways of getting the text content of the document.

The standards-compliant method is to use document.body.textContent, but
since it's DOM 3 it may not be widely supported beyond Mozilla/Firefox.

The IE-centric way is to use innerText as IE does not support textContent.

A third, reasonably cross-browser method is to use innerHTML and a
regular expression. But it's not a standard and different
implimentations may have small variations in how they've copied it from IE.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title> blah </title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<script type="text/javascript">

function showText( el )
{
var txt;
if ( el.textContent ) {
txt = 'textContent\n' + el.textContent;
} else if ( el.innerText ){
txt = 'innerText\n' + el.innerText;
} else if ( el.innerHTML ) {
txt = 'innerHTML\n' + el.innerHTML.replace(/<\/?.[^\>]*>/g,'');
}
return txt;
}

</script>
</head>
<body >
<div onclick="alert(showText( document.body ));">
Here is <div>the <span> content. <b>Hi</b></span>
<br>Click me to see the content.
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

doug s · Sep 12, 2005

RobG said:
There are at least three ways of getting the text content of the document.

The standards-compliant method is to use document.body.textContent, but
since it's DOM 3 it may not be widely supported beyond Mozilla/Firefox.

The IE-centric way is to use innerText as IE does not support textContent.

A third, reasonably cross-browser method is to use innerHTML and a regular
expression. But it's not a standard and different implimentations may
have small variations in how they've copied it from IE.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title> blah </title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<script type="text/javascript">

function showText( el )
{
var txt;
if ( el.textContent ) {
txt = 'textContent\n' + el.textContent;
} else if ( el.innerText ){
txt = 'innerText\n' + el.innerText;
} else if ( el.innerHTML ) {
txt = 'innerHTML\n' + el.innerHTML.replace(/<\/?.[^\>]*>/g,'');
}
return txt;
}

</script>
</head>
<body >
<div onclick="alert(showText( document.body ));">
Here is <div>the <span> content. <b>Hi</b></span>
<br>Click me to see the content.
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

thanks. that helps. Is there a way to fetch a page, without actually opening
it, and then use showText(el) ? Somehow pass in the url ?

thanks again.

Batch modifying text - content and context based	5	Jan 19, 2023
Measuring a string of text	1	Sep 15, 2022
How Do I Set text on an Image and use the image as a border?	7	Mar 16, 2023
Select Eof extension files based on text list of filenames with if condition	0	May 4, 2022
Iframe link overlapping text	4	Jan 18, 2021
Select files based on text list of filenames(part of the name:date) with condition	0	May 4, 2022
Show/Hide Table Rows in Webpage	22	Oct 5, 2009
Creating new form elements on a webpage	10	Aug 24, 2007

finding text on webpage

doug s

RobG

doug s

Ask a Question

Similar Threads

Members online

Forum statistics

Latest Threads