How to get an HTML element from a string with vanilla JS

Question

I have a variable with HTML in it. All I want to do is extract the last element of the node and click on it using pure vanilla JavaScript.

Here is what I have:

var rand = '
 <div class="readmorelink"> 
   <a href="example.com/link-to-follow/">
   Continue Reading        
   </a> 
 </div>';

I know how to do it jQuery but that needs to be in vanilla JS — CodyMan
– CodyMan, Commented Jan 23, 2017 at 12:48

Mouradif · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-23 13:14:22Z

4

in Vanilla JS you can create a DOM element and set its innerHTML to the string you have, it will automatically reproduce the DOM structure inside :

// Don't forget to escape newlines
var rand = '<div class="readmorelink">\
    <a href="//example.com/link-to-follow/">Continue Reading</a>\
 </div>';
var elt = document.createElement('body');
elt.innerHTML = rand;
var links = elt.getElementsByTagName('a');
var target = links[links.length - 1];

// Target now equals the last 'a' element in the DOM tree

var clickEvent = new MouseEvent("click", {
    "view": window,
    "bubbles": true,
    "cancelable": false
});

target.dispatchEvent(clickEvent);

edited Jan 23, 2017 at 13:14

answered Jan 23, 2017 at 12:57

Mouradif

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2 Comments

CodyMan Over a year ago

while dispatchevent its redirecting. example.com/link-to-follow//example.com/link-to-follow

Mouradif Over a year ago

Yes because of the href attribute in the a element. If that href was //example.com/link-to-follow/ with 2 slashes before (as in the edited post) or with a specified protocol (ie: https) it would send you to example.com domain

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