reliable html to string via Javascript

[sosuke]

I have tried to search for a solution to this problem before posting here but anything related to strings kicks back a million reference pages and when I start trying to get any more specific everything I find is about writing to the DOM when I need to just read it out!

I was using innerHTML and passing it through as well formatted XML to Flash for parsing. This was working great in Firefox and I thought I was nearly finished when I had the bright idea of testing in IE7. FAIL! Malformed XML could not be parsed.
IE7:

<DIV id=projects>

FF:

<div id="projects">

How can I get the equivalent string return for my HTML structure in IE7? innerHTML is not going to work as IE7 is stripping information and reformatting my text.

This is a sample of what I am using now:

document.getElementById("pageContainer").innerHTML

[Fang]

Afaik you will have to reformat the string to XML using regular expressions.

[sosuke]

Well I banged on some regex stuff for a while and what follows seems to work fairly well by first breaking the xml and then patching it again. I wish there was an easier way to wrap attributes in quotes but this seems to be working.

var dataString = document.getElementById("pageContainer").innerHTML;

if(navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer")
{
	dataString = dataString.replace(/\bDIV id=+\b/g,"div id=\"");
	dataString = dataString.replace(/\bDIV class=+\b/g,"div class=\"");
	dataString = dataString.replace(/\b>/g,'\">');
	dataString = dataString.replace(/\bDIV\">/g,'div>');
	dataString = dataString.replace(/.image=/g,"\" image=");
	dataString = escape(dataString);
}