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JS: Replace page text

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For this year’s April Fools Day, I decided I wanted to replace some text in the content of my site’s pages to something funny, weird, or confusing. Since I’m moving toward a static site, I wanted to do this client side, which meant replacing text with JavaScript. This would be simple with innerHTML, but that completely replaces the DOM with a new DOM, possibly causing usability and performance issues, and could replace text in URLs, breaking them. Probably a better way is to loop through all nodes on the page, looking for text nodes, and replace text in each of those. So I did this, and it worked nicely. Thought I’d share.

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Quick regex to strip html tags

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Recently, I needed to strip some HTML tags from some data. The goal was to make a field in a database that was a WYSIWYG text area into plain text content that could go inside a link. I did it using a simple regex of /<\/?[^>]+>/ to find the tags so I could replace them with an empty string. In PHP, this looked like:

$string = preg_replace('/<\/?[^>]+>/', '', $string);

This is perhaps a naïve implementation, but it served my purposes fine. Of course, I had totally forgotten about PHP’s built in strip_tags() function, but on comparing it, it also seems to not do exactly what I want. For instance, it seems to get rid of the content of <a> tags.