July 6, 2001 - Deleting DOM Substrings

Yehuda Shiran July 6, 2001
Deleting DOM Substrings
Tips: July 2001

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

Internet Explorer 6 is richer in functionality than Internet Explorer 5.5 in its text manipulation support. The deleteData() method is one example. Operating on text nodes, it deletes a substring from the text node data. You can specify the offset of the substring and its length. Here is its syntax:

textObj.deleteData(offset, count);

where:

offset is a long integer value indicating the offset of the substring, in characters, from the beginning of the string.
    • count is a long integer value indicating the number of characters to delete, starting from the specified offset.

    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 delete a substring that starts at offset 15 and of length 9. Click this button to get the answer in Netscape 6 or Internet Explorer 6 (Doc JavaScript Columns). Click in Internet Explorer 5.x and get an error message:

    Here is the definition of this button:

    <FORM>
<INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Delete a Substring" 
       onClick="javascript:handleClick()">
</FORM>

    The event handler is defined as follows:

    function handleClick() {
  txtObj.deleteData(15, 9);
  alert(txtObj.data);
}