Is it possible to get the root HTML tag, not just body node?

Question

In both of the following examples, speechTextString ends up including text from the entire document, including text outside of the BODY tag.

Example 1:

r = document.body;
speechTextString = r.innerText;

Example 2:

r = document.getElementsByTagName("BODY").item(0);
speechTextString = r.innerText;

Is it possible to get the root HTML tag, not just the body element?

You should provide a testable example. Check if your HTML is correctly formed. — trincot, Dec 18 '16 at 09:37
please edit question and explain what you want to achieve... — Marek Urbanowicz, Dec 18 '16 at 09:58

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 18 '16 at 09:43

text outside of the BODY tag

Assuming you aren't talking about the content of the <head> element:

You can't have text outside the <body> element. HTML does not allow it. The browser performs error recovery and moves it inside the <body> element when it parsing the (invalid) HTML into a DOM.

If you want to process a document with that error in it, then you will need to fetch the raw source code (e.g. with XMLHttpRequest) and then write a custom parser for it.

@Kaiido — Comments are comment nodes, not text nodes. – Quentin Dec 18 '16 at 11:13 — Quentin, Dec 18 '16 at 11:13

Is it possible to get the root HTML tag, not just body node?

1 Answers1