Searching for stuff in the DOM
McBachmann and me just discussed regular expression literals in JavaScript and came up with a nice little tip:
If you want to search a web page even if it’s DOM has already been changed via JavaScript routines, you can use the ability of modern (as in Firefox/Opera or Webkit based) browsers to execute custom Javascript on any web page to match any DOM elements HTML representation against a regular expression for example. Firefox can do this via the Firebug extension. Safari, Chrome and Opera are already equipped with a JavaScript console.
An example? Here you go:
alert(
/\b\w*\b/.exec(
document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML)
)
);
This will output the first occurrence of a string matching the given regular expression.
You won’t need this every day, but it may come in handy.
