.nextSibling and 'phantom' textNodes

Little function to *not* crash IE

[whoisgregg]

Was causing IE to crash with a .nextSibling.className call that was inadvertently referencing a non-existent text Node. (Previously referred to by Bernard Marx as 'phantom' text nodes [webmasterworld.com].)

Wrote a function to return a real nextSibling, thought I'd post it here in case others have similar headaches.

function getNextSibling(el) {
el = el.nextSibling;
while (el.nodeType!=1) {
el = el.nextSibling;
}
return el;
}

Usage: (returns [object UL])

<p onclick="alert(getNextSibling(this))">Testing</p>

<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>

[Bernard Marx]

Ah, how the past comes back to haunt us.

I think you might be reaching for the paracetamols with that one too, I'm afraid.
It doesn't check to see if there is a nextSibling, so it errors if you use the last element as input.

Try this one:

<script>
function getNextSibling(el)
{
    while((el=el.nextSibling) && el.nodeType!=1);
    return el;
}
function test(el)
{
    var next = getNextSibling(el);
    if(next) next.style.backgroundColor = 'blue';
    else alert('no nextSibling');
}
</script>
<ul>
    <li onclick="test(this);">some text</li>
    <li onclick="test(this);">some text</li>
    <li onclick="test(this);">some text</li>
    <li onclick="test(this);">some text</li>
</ul>

[whoisgregg]

Always more to learn, thank you. :)