JavaScript Parse and Convert Raw HTML String to DOM Nodes

Let’s say we have an HTML string like the following that we just want to convert into pure DOM nodes:

const htmlString = `
  <div id="root">
    <h1>Hello</h1>
    <p>World</p>
  </div>
`;

What are our options ? Let’s quickly go through all of them.

Range API

The Range API provides us with a method called createContextualFragment that we can use to generate a DocumentFragment containing the parsed DOM nodes out of the passed HTML string.

const range = document.createRange();
const fragment = range.createContextualFragment(htmlString);

Template

We can create a template tag element in memory and then pass the HTML string to it’s innerHTML property. Effectively the template.content property will end up having the DOM nodes wrapped in a DocumentFragment.

const template = document.createElement('template');
template.innerHTML = htmlString;
const fragment = template.content;

DOMParser

Using the DOMParser.parseFromString() method, we can parse and convert an HTML or XML string into DOM nodes wrapped in an HTMLDocument (or XMLDocument).

const parser = new DOMParser();
// HTMLDocument(<html><body>...parsed nodes</body></html>)
const doc = parser.parseFromString(htmlString);
// Parsed nodes
const nodes = doc.body;

If you want to learn about how to render raw HTML strings into a target DOM node, then I’ve written about it here.

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