How to append text to a div element?

Question

I’m using AJAX to append data to a <div> element, where I fill the <div> from JavaScript. How can I append new data to the <div> without losing the previous data found in it?

Answer 1

Try this:

var div = document.getElementById('divID');

div.innerHTML += 'Extra stuff';

Answer 2

Using appendChild:

var theDiv = document.getElementById("<ID_OF_THE_DIV>");
var content = document.createTextNode("<YOUR_CONTENT>");
theDiv.appendChild(content);

Using innerHTML:
This approach will remove all the listeners to the existing elements as mentioned by @BiAiB. So use caution if you are planning to use this version.

var theDiv = document.getElementById("<ID_OF_THE_DIV>");
theDiv.innerHTML += "<YOUR_CONTENT>"; 

Answer 3

Beware of innerHTML, you sort of lose something when you use it:

theDiv.innerHTML += 'content';

Is equivalent to:

theDiv.innerHTML = theDiv.innerHTML + 'content';

Which will destroy all nodes inside your div and recreate new ones. All references and listeners to elements inside it will be lost.

If you need to keep them (when you have attached a click handler, for example), you have to append the new contents with the DOM functions(appendChild,insertAfter,insertBefore):

var newNode = document.createElement('div');
newNode.innerHTML = data;
theDiv.appendChild(newNode);

Answer 4

If you want to do it fast and don't want to lose references and listeners use: .insertAdjacentHTML();

"It does not reparse the element it is being used on and thus it does not corrupt the existing elements inside the element. This, and avoiding the extra step of serialization make it much faster than direct innerHTML manipulation."

Supported on all mainline browsers (IE6+, FF8+,All Others and Mobile): http://caniuse.com/#feat=insertadjacenthtml

Example from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/insertAdjacentHTML

// <div id="one">one</div>
var d1 = document.getElementById('one');
d1.insertAdjacentHTML('afterend', '<div id="two">two</div>');

// At this point, the new structure is:
// <div id="one">one</div><div id="two">two</div>

Answer 5

If you are using jQuery you can use $('#mydiv').append('html content') and it will keep the existing content.

http://api.jquery.com/append/

Answer 6

IE9+ (Vista+) solution, without creating new text nodes:

var div = document.getElementById("divID");
div.textContent += data + " ";

However, this didn't quite do the trick for me since I needed a new line after each message, so my DIV turned into a styled UL with this code:

var li = document.createElement("li");
var text = document.createTextNode(data);
li.appendChild(text);
ul.appendChild(li);

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/textContent :

Differences from innerHTML

innerHTML returns the HTML as its name indicates. Quite often, in order to retrieve or write text within an element, people use innerHTML. textContent should be used instead. Because the text is not parsed as HTML, it's likely to have better performance. Moreover, this avoids an XSS attack vector.

Answer 7

Even this will work:

var div = document.getElementById('divID');

div.innerHTML += 'Text to append';

Answer 8

An option that I think is better than any of the ones mentioned so far is Element.insertAdjacentText().

// Example listener on a child element
// Included in this snippet to show that the listener does not get corrupted
document.querySelector('button').addEventListener('click', () => {
  console.log('click');
});

// to actually insert the text:
document.querySelector('div').insertAdjacentText('beforeend', 'more text');

<div>
  <button>click</button>
</div>

Advantages to this approach include:

• Does not modify the existing nodes in the DOM; does not corrupt event listeners
• Inserts text, not HTML (Best to only use .insertAdjacentHTML when deliberately inserting HTML - using it unnecessarily is less semantically appropriate and can increase the risk of XSS)
• Flexible; the first argument to .insertAdjacentText may be beforebegin, beforeend, afterbegin, afterend, depending on where you'd like the text to be inserted

Answer 9

you can use jQuery. which make it very simple.

just download the jQuery file add jQuery into your HTML
or you can user online link:

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.3/jquery.min.js"></script>

and try this:

 $("#divID").append(data);

Answer 10

The following method is less general than others however it's great when you are sure that your last child node of the div is already a text node. In this way you won't create a new text node using appendData MDN Reference AppendData

let mydiv = document.getElementById("divId");
let lastChild = mydiv.lastChild;

if(lastChild && lastChild.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE ) //test if there is at least a node and the last is a text node
   lastChild.appendData("YOUR TEXT CONTENT");

Answer 11

java script

document.getElementById("divID").html("this text will be added to div");

jquery

$("#divID").html("this text will be added to div");

Use .html() without any arguments to see that you have entered. You can use the browser console to quickly test these functions before using them in your code.

Answer 12

Why not just use setAttribute ?

thisDiv.setAttribute('attrName','data you wish to append');

Then you can get this data by :

thisDiv.attrName;