javascript - How to render a HTML comment in React?

Question

Currently the render method can only return a single element/component. See: here

In the discussion under that ticket some suggest to wrap multiple elements returned from a React component in a HTML comment so that the wrapping component is ignored by the browser, e.g.:

<A>
    <B></B>
    <Fragment>
        <C></C>
        <D></D>
    </Fragment>
    <E></E>
</A>

would render to:

<a>
    <b></b>
    <!--<fragment data-reactid="">-->
        <c></c>
        <d></d>
    <!--</fragment>-->
    <e></e>
</a>

But how to actually create a component that renders just HTML comment? In other words, how the render function of the 'fragment' component in the example above could look like?

Answer 1

This is what I have ended up with in one of my recent projects:

import React, {Component, PropTypes} from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';

class ReactComment extends Component {
    static propTypes = {
        text: PropTypes.string,
        trim: PropTypes.bool
    };

    static defaultProps = {
        trim: true
    };

    componentDidMount() {
        let el = ReactDOM.findDOMNode(this);
        ReactDOM.unmountComponentAtNode(el);
        el.outerHTML = this.createComment();
    }

    createComment() {
        let text = this.props.text;

        if (this.props.trim) {
            text = text.trim();
        }

        return `<!-- ${text} -->`;
    }

    render() {
        return <div />;
    }
}

export default ReactComment;

So you can use it like this:

<A>
    <B></B>
    <ReactComment text="<fragment>" />
        <C></C>
        <D></D>
     <ReactComment text="</fragment>" />
    <E></E>
</A>