February 4, 2001 - Splitting DOM Nodes

Yehuda Shiran February 4, 2001
Splitting DOM Nodes
Tips: February 2001

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

Netscape 6 is as rich as Internet Explorer as far as text node splitting is concerned. The splitText() method splits a text node into two text nodes. The new text node becomes a sibling immediately following the original text node. You can specify how to split the characters into the two text node:

newObj = textObj.splitText(offset);

where:

offset is a long integer value indicating the number of characters to leave in the first text node.

Let's create a text node at the document level. We put the following line in the header of this tip:

txtObj = document.createTextNode("Doc JavaScript BiWeekly Columns");

and then let's split the text node into two text nodes, leaving 15 characters in the first text node. Click this button to get it done in Netscape 6 and Internet Explorer 5.5 (the first text node is Doc JavaScript, while the second text node is BiWeekly Columns):

Here is the definition of this button:

<FORM>
<INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Split a Text Node" onClick="javascript:handleClick()">
</FORM>

Here is how we define the function handleClick():

function handleClick() {
  newNode = txtObj.splitText(15);
  alert(newNode.data);
}