Adding and Removing Nodes (HTML Elements)
March 21, 2017
Creating new nodes
createElement()creates an HTML elementcreateTextNode()creates a text nodeappendChild()appends (adds to the end) a nodeinsertBefore()prepends a node, opposite of .appendChild()removeChild()removes a child nodereplaceChild()replaces a child nodecloneNode()creates a copy of the node (You can clone a node before adding it for example)
Creating and adding
code
let paragraph = document.createElement("p"); // create a paragraph (<p> element)
// to add text to the <p> element, create a text node first
let node1 = document.createTextNode("This is new paragraph i just added to the DOM");
let node2 = document.createTextNode("This is the text i'm going to add before");
paragraph.appendChild(node1); // add (append) the text node to the <p> element
code
// create a container <div> element
let container = document.createElement("div");
// cerate two paragraph <p> elements
let para = document.createElement("p"); // create a pragraph
let anotherPara = document.createElement("p"); // create another paragraph
// create some text nodes to add to <p> elements
let text1 = document.createTextNode("This is some text");
let text2 = document.createTextNode("This is some more random text");
// append text to paragraphs
para.append(text1);
anotherPara.append(text2);
console.info(para); // <p>This is some text</p>
console.info(anotherPara); // <p>This is some more random text</p>
console.info(container); // <div></div>
// append a paragraph to a div
container.append(para);
console.info(container); // <div><p>This is some text</p></div>
// insert a paragraph before another paragraph in the div
// parentNode.insertBefore(newNode, referenceNode)
container.insertBefore(anotherPara, para);
console.info(container); // <div><p>This is some more random text</p><p>This is some text</p></div>
We have created the following HTML structure using JavaScript
code
<div>
<p> This is some more random text </p>
<p> This is some text </p>
</div>
Removing nodes
code
let parent = document.getElementById("div1");
let child = document.getElementById("p1");
parent.removeChild(child);
Replacing nodes
code
let para = document.createElement("p");
let node = document.createTextNode("This is new.");
para.appendChild(node);
let parent = document.getElementById("div1");
let child = document.getElementById("p1");
parent.replaceChild(para, child);