Code snippet: What's up, DOCTYPE?

In a previous post I mentioned using AJAX to call server-side functions and write dynamic content to the page. Here I introduce an easy workaround for one of the places where Webcrossing trips over its own flexibility.

There's a system setting to include a DOCTYPE in every page response for compliance with W3C standards. But once defined, this happens automatically for every request, including those which are not intended to be a full page of HTML, such as the response to an AJAX call. In order to avoid breaking your page, use this simple clientside Javascript function to remove the DOCTYPE:


function removeDoctype( txt ) {
return txt.replace(/<!DOCTYPE[^>]+>/g, "");
}

Implemented with a jQuery AJAX call, it looks like this:

$.get("/someNewContent",,function(newText) {
    $('#newContentGoesHere').html(removeDoctype(newText));
  });

A colleague of mine likes to say, "Every so often a programmer will determine that the best solution for a problem is a regular expression. Now she has two problems."