I've always appreciated these tools: Expresso
and XPath Builder. They make designing regular expressions
and XPath selectors almost fun! Did I say fun? I meant less painful. Being able to paste/load text
and then interactively play with the search criteria is infinitely better than the code/compile/run/test cycle. It's faster
and you get a much better feel for how the expressions work.
So, I decided to make my own interactive tool to test jQuery selectors: jQuery Selector Tester.
Here's a sneak peek:
Note: There are some existing tools you may like better:
http://www.woods.iki.fi/interactive-jquery-tester.html
http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/trysel.asp?filename=trysel_basic&jqsel=p.intro,%23choose
My tool is different:
It is one page. You can save it
and run it locally without a Web Server.
It shows the results as a list of iterated objects instead of highlighted html.
A cheat sheet is on the same page as the tester which is handy.
I couldn't upload an .htm or .html file to this site so I hosted it on my personal site here: jQuery Selector Tester.
Design Highlights:
To make the interactive search work, I added a hidden div to the page:
<!--Hidden div holds DOM elements for jQuery to search--><div id="HiddenDiv" style="display: none"></div>
When ready to search, the searchable html text is copied into the hidden div…this renders the DOM tree in the hidden div:
// get the html to search, insert it to the hidden divvar Html = $("#TextAreaHTML").val();$("#HiddenDiv").html(Html);
When doing a search, I modify the search pattern to look only in the HiddenDiv. To do that, I put a space between the patterns. The space is the Ancestor operator (see the Cheat Sheet):
// modify search string to only search in our// hidden div
and do the searchvar SearchString = "#HiddenDiv " + SearchPattern;try{ var $FoundItems = $(SearchString);}
Big Fat Stinking Faux Pas:
I was about to publish this article when I made a big mistake: I tested the tool with Mozilla FireFox. It blowed up…it blowed up real good. In the past I’ve only had to target IE so this was quite a revelation.
When I started to learn JavaScript, I was disgusted to see all the browser dependent code. Who wants to spend their time
testing against different browsers
and versions of browsers? Adding a bunch of ‘if-else’ code is a tedious
and thankless task. I avoided client code as much as I could.
Then jQuery came along
and all was good. It was browser independent
and freed us from the tedium of worrying about version N of the Acme browser.
Right? Wrong!
I had used outerHTML to display the selected elements. The problem is Mozilla FireFox doesn’t implement outerHTML.
I replaced this:
// encode the html markupvar OuterHtml = $('<div/>').text(this.outerHTML).html();
With this:
// encode the html markupvar Html = $('<div>').append(this).html();var OuterHtml = $('<div/>').text(Html).html();
Another problem was that Mozilla FireFox doesn’t implement srcElement.
I replaced this:
var Row = e.srcElement.parentNode;
With this:
var Row = e.target.parentNode;
Another problem was the indexing. The browsers have different ways of indexing.
I replaced this:
// this cell has the search pattern var Cell = Row.childNodes[1]; // put the pattern in the search box
and search $("#TextSearchPattern").val(Cell.innerText);
With this:
// get the correct cell
and the text in the cell// place the text in the seach box
and serachvar Cell = $(Row).find("TD:nth-child(2)");var CellText = Cell.text();$("#TextSearchPattern").val(CellText);
So much for the myth of browser independence. Was I overly optimistic
and gullible? I don’t think so.
And when I get my millions from the deposed Nigerian prince I sent money to, you’ll see that having faith is not futile.
Notes:
My goal was to have a single standalone file. I tried to keep the features
and CSS to a minimum–adding only enough to make it useful
and visually pleasing.
When
testing, I often thought there was a problem with the jQuery selector. Invariable it was invalid html code. If your results aren't what you expect, don't assume it's the jQuery selector pattern: The html may be invalid.
To help in development
and testing, I added a double-click handler to the rows in the Cheat Sheet table. If you double-click a row, the search pattern is put in the search box, a search is performed
and the page is scrolled so you can see the results. I left the test html
and code in the page.
If you are using a CDN (non-local) version of the jQuery libraray, the designer in Visual Studio becomes extremely slow. That's why there are two version of the library in the header
and one is commented out.
For reference, here is the jQuery documentation on selectors:
http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/
Here is a much more comprehensive list of CSS selectors (which jQuery uses):
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html
I hope someone finds this useful.
Steve WellensCodeProject
