Please push me towards a duplicate of this question if possible. I've looked everywhere but can't seem to find it.
How do I do a getElementById on text content?
var test = '<div id="thisDiv">HI</div>';
How do I select thisDiv if it's not a part of the DOM?
Create an element, set your string as its innerHTML and then search inside that ...
Something like
var test = '<div id="thisDiv">HI</div>';
var element = document.createElement('DIV');
element.innerHTML = test;
alert(element.textContent);
(changed the initial outerHTML as you can only maintain a reference to the originaly created element, and not the new one that is created by the new html)
For getting the text value inside your tags, use RegEx:
var re = new RegExp("<(.|\n)*?>", "g");
var content = test.replace(re,"");
You could create a temporary DIV and populate it with your string. Even then, your ability to access it would be limited. Add it to the DOM to access it using getElementById.
var div = document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML = '<div id="thisDiv">HI</div>';
alert(div.firstChild);
To avoid creating that extra element, we could just add it to the body...
var test = '<div id="thisDiv">HI</div>';
document.querySelector('body').innerHTML = test;
console.log(document.getElementById('thisDiv'));
Getting just the text...
console.log(document.getElementById('thisDiv').textContent); // returns HI
/<(.|\n)*?>/g)