Map HTML to JSON [closed]

I just wrote this function that does what you want; try it out let me know if it doesn't work correctly for you:

// Test with an element.var initElement = document.getElementsByTagName("html")[0];var json = mapDOM(initElement, true);console.log(json);// Test with a string.initElement = "<div><span>text</span>Text2</div>";json = mapDOM(initElement, true);console.log(json);function mapDOM(element, json) {    var treeObject = {};        // If string convert to document Node    if (typeof element === "string") {        if (window.DOMParser) {              parser = new DOMParser();              docNode = parser.parseFromString(element,"text/xml");        } else { // Microsoft strikes again              docNode = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");              docNode.async = false;              docNode.loadXML(element);         }         element = docNode.firstChild;    }        //Recursively loop through DOM elements and assign properties to object    function treeHTML(element, object) {        object["type"] = element.nodeName;        var nodeList = element.childNodes;        if (nodeList != null) {            if (nodeList.length) {                object["content"] = [];                for (var i = 0; i < nodeList.length; i++) {                    if (nodeList[i].nodeType == 3) {                        object["content"].push(nodeList[i].nodeValue);                    } else {                        object["content"].push({});                        treeHTML(nodeList[i], object["content"][object["content"].length -1]);                    }                }            }        }        if (element.attributes != null) {            if (element.attributes.length) {                object["attributes"] = {};                for (var i = 0; i < element.attributes.length; i++) {                    object["attributes"][element.attributes[i].nodeName] = element.attributes[i].nodeValue;                }            }        }    }    treeHTML(element, treeObject);        return (json) ? JSON.stringify(treeObject) : treeObject;}

Working example: http://jsfiddle.net/JUSsf/ (Tested in Chrome, I can't guarantee full browser support - you will have to test this).

​It creates an object that contains the tree structure of the HTML page in the format you requested and then uses JSON.stringify() which is included in most modern browsers (IE8+, Firefox 3+ .etc); If you need to support older browsers you can include json2.js.

It can take either a DOM element or a string containing valid XHTML as an argument (I believe, I'm not sure whether the DOMParser() will choke in certain situations as it is set to "text/xml" or whether it just doesn't provide error handling. Unfortunately "text/html" has poor browser support).

You can easily change the range of this function by passing a different value as element. Whatever value you pass will be the root of your JSON map.

Representing complex HTML documents will be difficult and full of corner cases, but I just wanted to share a couple techniques to show how to get this kind of program started. This answer differs in that it uses data abstraction and the toJSON method to recursively build the result

Below, html2json is a tiny function which takes an HTML node as input and it returns a JSON string as the result. Pay particular attention to how the code is quite flat but it's still plenty capable of building a deeply nested tree structure – all possible with virtually zero complexity

// data Elem = Elem Nodeconst Elem = e => ({  toJSON : () => ({    tagName:       e.tagName,    textContent:      e.textContent,    attributes:      Array.from(e.attributes, ({name, value}) => [name, value]),    children:      Array.from(e.children, Elem)  })})// html2json :: Node -> JSONStringconst html2json = e =>  JSON.stringify(Elem(e), null, '  ')  console.log(html2json(document.querySelector('main')))

<main>  <h1 class="mainHeading">Some heading</h1>  <ul id="menu">    <li><a href="/a">a</a></li>    <li><a href="/b">b</a></li>    <li><a href="/c">c</a></li>  </ul>  <p>some text</p></main>