How to get Handlebars templates to return DOM elements instead of string of HTML?

Question

I am using Handlebars in my Backbone.js application. I am wondering how to get Handlebars template to return DOM elements instead of a string?

This is what I mean:

define([
    'underscore',
    'backbone',
    'handlebars',
    'text!templates/myTemplate.hbs'
], function(_, Backbone, handlebars, template) {
   ...
   ...
   render: function() {
       // This returns me a string of HTML, I would like to be able
       // to get actual DOM elements so that I can use appendChild
       // and insertBefore etc.
       var hbTemplate = Handlebars.compile(template);
       var templateString = hbTemplate(/* some json data */);
   },
   ...
   ...

I have tried to use DOMParser to parse the HTML string into DOM elements but there are syntax errors due to a lot of extra spaces from the Handlebars template. But it would be nice if Handlebars can somehow return the DOM elements instead of me parsing them myself.

Answer 1

you can pipe the output to jQuery(if that is a option) that parses handlebar templates to my knowledge. dont know if jQuery is a option but somthing like:

var hbTemplate = Handlebars.compile(template);
var templateJqueryDom = $(hbTemplate(/* some json data */))