I am trying to do this:
To do the above, I would need to search the DOM with Node to find the open and closing body tags. How can this be done?
Very simply, you can use the native Filesystem module that comes with Node.JS. (var fs = require("fs")). This allows you to read and convert the HTML to a string, perform string replace functions, and finally save the file again by rewriting it.
The advantage is that this solution is completely native, and requires no external libraries. It is also completely faithful to the original HTML file.
//Starts reading the file and converts to string.
fs.readFile('myDocument.html', function (err, myDocData) {
fs.readFile('foo.html', function (err, fooData) { //reads foo file
myDocData.replace(/\<body\>/, "<body>" + fooData); //adds foo file to HTML
fs.readFile('bar.html', function (err, barData) { //reads bar file
myDocData.replace(/\<\/body\>/, barData + "</body>"); //adds bar file to HTML
fs.writeFile('myDocumentNew.html', myDocData, function (err) {}); //writes new file.
});
});
});
In a simple but not accurate way, you can do this:
str = str.replace(/(<body.*?>)/i, "$1"+read('foo.html'));
str = str.replace(/(<\/body>)/i, read('bar.html')+'$1');
It will not work if the myDocument content contains multiple "<body ..' or '</body>', e.g. in javascript, and also the foo.html and bar.html can not contains '$1' or '$2'...
If you can edit the content of myDocument, then you can leave some "placeholder" there(as html comments), like
<!--foo.html-->
Then, it's easy, just replace this "placeholder" .
Use the cheerio library, which has a simplified jQuery-ish API.
var cheerio = require('cheerio');
var dom = cheerio(myDocumentHTMLString);
dom('body').prepend(fooHTMLString);
dom('body').append(barHTMLString);
var finalHTML = dom.html();
And just to be clear since the legions of pro-regex individuals are already appearing in droves, yes you need a real parser. No you cannot use a regular expression. Read Stackoverflow lead developer Jeff Atwood's post on parsing HTML the Cthulhu way.
It's considered good form to demand that regular expressions be considered verboten, totally off limits for processing HTML, but I think that's just as wrongheaded as demanding **every trivial HTML processing task be handled by a full-blown parsing engine**. It's more important to understand the tools, and their strengths and weaknesses, than it is to knuckle under to knee-jerk dogmatism.