appendChild + createElement

Question

What's the difference between:

var div = document.createElement('div');//output -> [object HTMLDivElement]

document.getElementById('container').appendChild(div);

and:

var div = '<div></div>';

document.getElementById('container').appendChild(div);//output -> <div></div>

Shouldn't both be the same? And if not, how do I get the second version to work?

Answer 1

The latter is simply a string containing HTML while the first is an object. For the first, you need appendChild while for the second, you need to append to innerHTML .

shouldn't both be the same? and if not, how do i get the 2nd version to work?

var div = '<div></div>';
document.getElementById('container').innerHTML += div;

Answer 2

With your JS/DOM engine, calling Element.appendChild with a string as an argument causes a new Text node to be created then added.

Your first example creates a <div> element. Your second example creates a text node with <div></div> as its contents.

Your second example is equivalent to:

var div = '<div></div>';

document.getElementById('container').appendChild(document.createTextNode(div));//output -> <div></div>

As Sarfraz Ahmed mentioned in his answer , you can make the second example work how you want it to work by writing:

var div = '<div></div>';

document.getElementById('container').innerHTML = div;

Answer 3

appendChild really does expect a HTMLDomNode of some kind, such as a HTMLDivElement , and not a string. It doesn't know how to deal with a string. You could do

document.getElementById('container').innerHTML += div;

but I really prefer the first version; and I'd rely more on it to behave the same across browsers.

Answer 4

appendChild is expecting an element so when you send it text, it doesn't know what to do. You might want to look into using a javascript library to ease some of that work, such as jQuery. Your code would be:

$('#container').append('<div></div>');

Answer 5

The simplest solution and support all browsers is:

var div = '<div></div>';
var parser = new DOMParser();
var myDiv = parser.parseFromString( html, "text/xml" );

Another solution may be:

var div = '<div></div>';
var tmpDiv = document.createElement('div');
    tmpDiv.innerHTML = div;

    elDiv = tmpDiv.childNodes[0]; //Now it can be used as an element

Answer 6

You can also use these to append/prepend an element to the DOM respectively:

var elem = document.documentElement.appendChild(document.createElement(element));
var elem = document.documentElement.prepend(document.createElement(element));

and use the elem variable to target the element (eg):

elem.style.display = "block";
elem.style.remove();
elem.style.id = ...;

etc.