javascript - Display HTML markup in browser without it being rendered

Question

Starting to implement Javascript, I need to do troubleshooting and would like to output HTML to the screen without it being rendered. I can access the element (in IE) by

document.getElementById("test").outerHTML

I think, but I can't prove what I'm getting to be sure.

So what do I do to have document.write show the entire element including tags?

Answer 1

Do you mean you want the literal, for example, <b>Hello</b> instead of Hello?

If so, just do a quick:

myHTML = myHTML.replace(/[<>&
]/g, function(x) {
    return {
        '<': '&lt;',
        '>': '&gt;',
        '&': '&amp;',
       '
': '<br />'
    }[x];
});

Before outputting it. You can apply this to many other characters, say for instance if you wanted to output whitespace literally.