Convert DOM to String

While working on one of my projects I came across a scenario where I needed to convert the DOM object into a String representation to send it as an AJAX request parameter.

The way to do this is as follows:

Suppose you have a form named “Test”.

We first get the DOM object of the current page as follows:

var domObject = document.Test;

//Now lets convert this DOM to String

var domToString = domObject.innerHTML;

Thats it!!! Put an alert and you’ll see the complete DOM in a string representation.

alert(domToString);

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 6:58 am and is filed under JavaScript. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

8 comments

  1. John Stracke
    March 16, 2010 at 12:58 pm

    Minor point: this apparently doesn’t work for XML documents.

  2. Nischal Shetty
    March 17, 2010 at 2:55 am

    @John
    Thnks for the info :)

  3. Timo
    July 23, 2010 at 9:14 am

    For XML, you can just do:

    var str = (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(domObject);

  4. Nischal Shetty
    July 24, 2010 at 11:59 am

    @Timo cool, thanks for the info.

  5. Richard H
    November 11, 2010 at 8:21 pm

    lol …people neglect to mention a few critical things …that are driving me crazy

    1. XMLSerializer works beautifully BUT NOT IN IE
    2. inner/outerHTML are junk – for one thing they strip out the trailing slash in singleton nodes ie. becomes rendering valid XHTML invalid in the conversion (I believe there are other problems also

  6. Richard H
    November 11, 2010 at 8:23 pm

    sorry this site doesn’t handle special character input I see so let me try again … <br/> becomes <br> when using inner/outerHTML

    …I’m so completely sick of poorly designed software that is release on the unsuspecting developer

  7. Nischal Shetty
    November 12, 2010 at 2:24 am

    <br /> isn’t right anyways. So it becoming <br> is the right thing to happen. Am I right on this or is that wrong?

  8. Nischal Shetty
    November 12, 2010 at 2:28 am

    If you see the spec the end tag in BR is “forbidden” http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-BR

    I think this is one of the common mistakes people do while writing BR tags and since most of us don’t validate our html these things go unnoticed.

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