Adding Text to a Page

Next, you can create a script that actually adds text to a page. To do this, you must first create a new text node. This statement creates a new text node with the text “this is a test”:

var node=document.createTextNode("this is a test");

Next, you can add this node to the document. To do this, you use the appendChild method. The text can be added to any element that can contain text, but we will use a paragraph. The following statement adds the text node defined previously to the paragraph with the identifier p1:

document.getElementById("p1").appendChild(node);

Listing 15.8 shows the HTML document for a complete example that uses this technique, using a form to allow the user to specify text to add to the page.

Listing 15.8 Adding Text to a Page