Range.surroundContents

The Range.surroundContents() method moves content of the Range into a new node, placing the new node at the start of the specified range.

This method is nearly equivalent to newNode.appendChild(range.extractContents()); range.insertNode(newNode). After surrounding, the boundary points of the range include newNode.

An exception will be thrown, however, if the Range splits a non-Text node with only one of its boundary points. That is, unlike the alternative above, if there are partially selected nodes, they will not be cloned and instead the operation will fail.

Syntax

range.surroundContents(newNode);

Parameters

newNode

A Node to split based on the range.

Example

var range = document.createRange();
var newNode = document.createElement("p");

range.selectNode(document.getElementsByTagName("div").item(0));
range.surroundContents(newNode);

Specifications

Specification	Status	Comment
DOM The definition of 'Range.surroundContents()' in that specification.	Living Standard	No change.
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Traversal and Range Specification The definition of 'Range.surroundContents()' in that specification.	Recommendation	Initial specification.

Browser compatibility

[1] Before Firefox 1.5, a bug was preventing Range.surroundContents to work if the start and end of range were in same textnode (bug 135928).

See also

• The DOM interfaces index