Trying to use the DOMParser with node js

A lot of browser functionalities, like DOM manipulations or XHR, are not available natively NodeJS because that is not a typical server task to access the DOM - you'll have to use an external library to do that.

DOM capacities depends a lot on the library, here's a quick comparisons of the main tools you can use:

  • jsdom: implements DOM level 4 which is the latest DOM standard, so everything that you can do on a modern browser, you can do it in jsdom. It is the de-facto industry standard for doing browser stuff on Node, used by Mocha, Vue Test Utils, Webpack Prerender SPA Plugin, and many other:

    const jsdom = require("jsdom");
    const dom = new jsdom.JSDOM(`<!DOCTYPE html><p>Hello world</p>`);
    dom.window.document.querySelector("p").textContent; // 'Hello world'
    
  • deno_dom: if using Deno instead of Node is an option, this library provides DOM parsing capabilities:

    import { DOMParser } from "https://deno.land/x/deno_dom/deno-dom-wasm.ts";
    const parser = new DOMParser();
    const document = parser.parseFromString('<p>Hello world</p>', 'text/html');
    document.querySelector('p').textContent; // 'Hello world';
    
  • htmlparser2: same as jsdom, but with enhanced performances and flexibility at the price of a more complex API:

    const htmlparser = require("htmlparser2");
    const parser = new htmlparser.Parser({
      onopentag: (name, attrib) => {
        if (name=='p') console.log('a paragraph element is opening');
      }
    }, {decodeEntities: true});
    parser.write(`<!DOCTYPE html><p>Hello world</p>`);
    parser.end();
    // console output: 'a paragraph element is opening'
    
  • cheerio: implementation of jQuery based on HTML DOM parsing by htmlparser2:

    const cheerio = require('cheerio');
    const $ = cheerio.load(`<!DOCTYPE html><p>Hello world</p>`);
    $('p').text('Bye moon');
    $.html(); // '<!DOCTYPE html><p>Bye moon</p>'
    
  • xmldom: fully implements the DOM level 2 and partially implements the DOM level 3. Works with HTML, and with XML also

  • dom-parser: regex-based DOM parser that implements a few DOM methods like getElementById. Since parsing HTML with regular expressions is a very bad idea I wouldn't recommend this one for production.


There is no DOMParser in node.js, that's a browser thing. You can try any of these modules though:

https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules#wiki-parsers-xml


You can use a Node implementation of DOMParser, such as xmldom. This will allow you to access DOMParser outside of the browser. For example:

var DOMParser = require('xmldom').DOMParser;
var parser = new DOMParser();
var document = parser.parseFromString('Your XML String', 'text/xml');

I used jsdom because it's got a ton of usage and is written by a prominent web hero - no promises that it's behavior perfectly matches your browser (or even that every browser's behavior is the same) but it worked for me:

const jsdom = require("jsdom")
const { JSDOM } = jsdom
global.DOMParser = new JSDOM().window.DOMParser

I really like htmlparser2. It's a fantastic, fast and lightweight library. I've created a small demo on how to use it on RunKit: https://runkit.com/jfahrenkrug/htmlparser2-demo/1.0.0