How to get the entire HTML document as a string in JavaScript ?

Last Updated : 13 Apr, 2021

Given an HTML document, the task is to get the entire document as a string using JavaScript. Here few methods are discussed:

getElementsByTagName() Method
This method returns a set of all elements in the document with the defined tag name, as a NodeList object.
This object represents a collection of nodes, Which are accessed by index numbers. The index starts at 0.
Syntax:

document.getElementsByTagName(tagname)

Parameters:
- tagname: This parameter is required. It specifies the tagname of the elements to get.
HTML DOM innerHTML Property
This property set/return the HTML content (inner HTML) of an element.
Syntax:
- Return the innerHTML property:

HTMLElementObject.innerHTML

Set the innerHTML property:

HTMLElementObject.innerHTML = text

text: It specifies the HTML content of an element.

Example 1: This example gets the whole document as string using document.documentElement.innerHTML.

html

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html>
 
<head>
    <title>
        JavaScript | Get the entire document HTML as a string.
    </title>
</head>
 
<body style="text-align:center;" id="body">
    <h1 style="color:green;"> 
            GeeksforGeeks 
        </h1>
    <p id="GFG_UP" style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold;">
    </p>
 
    <button onclick="GFG_Fun(); ">
        click here
    </button>
    <script>
        var up = document.getElementById('GFG_UP');
        up.innerHTML = 'Click on the button to convert whole document to string';
 
        function GFG_Fun() {
            var string = document.documentElement.innerHTML;
            alert(string);
        }
    </script>
</body>
 
</html>

Output:

Before clicking the button:

After clicking the button:

Example 2: This example gets the whole document by first selecting the elements with tagname ‘HTML’ and selecting the first element by indexing using document.getElementsByTagName(‘html’)[0].innerHTML.

html

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html>
 
<head>
    <title>
        JavaScript | Get the entire document HTML as a string.
    </title>
</head>
 
<body style="text-align:center;" id="body">
    <h1 style="color:green;"> 
            GeeksforGeeks 
        </h1>
    <p id="GFG_UP" style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold;">
    </p>
 
    <button onclick="GFG_Fun(); ">
        click here
    </button>
    <script>
        var up = document.getElementById('GFG_UP');
        up.innerHTML = 'Click on the button to convert whole document to string';
 
        function GFG_Fun() {
            var string = document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML;
            alert(string);
        }
    </script>
</body>
 
</html>

Output:

Before clicking the button:

After clicking the button:

Supported Browsers:

Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Internet Explorer
Safari
Opera

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How to get the entire HTML document as a string in JavaScript ?

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