Is there a DOM API for querying comment nodes?

dom, html, javascript

Solution

There's the `TreeWalker` APIs:

var tw = document.createTreeWalker(document, NodeFilter.SHOW_COMMENT, null, null),
    comment;
while (comment = tw.nextNode()) {
    // ...
}

This isn't supported by IE8 and lower.

T.J. in the comments provided a link to the specs. I kind of always use just TreeWalkers, but in your case a `NodeIterator` is fine too.

Problem

I have a document with a debugging comment in it that looks like this: ``` <!--SERVER_TRACE {...}--> ``` Is there a way to query the DOM to access this node? I am looking for a vanilla JavaScript solution, without the aid of any libraries. My first thought was to depth first search the DOM and compare nodes found against the node type value for comments, `Node.COMMENT_NODE`. Is there an easier way?

Original source

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