Forum Moderators: open
<html>
<head>
<script language="JavaScript">
function search(form) {
var searchText = form.findthis.value.toLowerCase()
var everything = document.body.innerHTML.toLowerCase()
var position = everything.indexOf(searchText)
var message = "You searched for '"+ searchText
message = message + "'.\n\nThe lowercased innerHTML looks like this:\n\n"
message = message + everything + "\n\nPosition:\n" + position
alert(message)
}
function doFocus() {
document.form1.findthis.focus()
}
</script>
</head>
<body onLoad="doFocus()">
<form name="form1" onSubmit="search(this); return false">
<input type="text" name="findthis" size="15">
<input type="submit" value="Find">
</form>
<p>This is some text. Try searching for one of these words.</p>
<p>In theory you should get the position of the word you've searched for, but you'll actually get 76 instead.</p>
<p>Have a close look at the innerHTML displayed in the alert, you'll see that it doesn't match the actual HTML code.</p>
<p>Specifically, there are problems with the attribute quotes in the input element.</p>
</body>
</html>
<added>
Using single quotes causes Mozilla to replace them with double quotes...
Opera leaves the quotes alone...
IE again removes the quotes entirely...
</added>
But that doesn't explain why I can't get a result for a position past 76! It really shouldn't matter if the string variable everything has single quotes or double quotes or no qoutes for the attributes. I should still be able to use indexOf(), shouldn't I?
This still seems like bizarre behaviour to me, because all I want to do is use inString() on a normal string variable! How strange that I can't get a position in a string... maybe the browser doesn't actually store the variable as a genuine string object, maybe it still has a reference back to the objects in the DOM?
My best work-around so far: I put the paragraphs in a div with an id, and I look at the innerHTML of that div. Because the form is outside the div it doesn't cause problems. I still don't like this solution: what if my page has another form somewhere in it - I still want to be able to find text that's after the form. :-(
