javascript - Is there a DOM API for querying comment nodes?

Question

I have a document with a debugging comment in it that looks like this:

<!--SERVER_TRACE {...}-->

Is there a way to query the DOM to access this node? I am looking for a vanilla JavaScript solution, without the aid of any libraries.

My first thought was to depth first search the DOM and compare nodes found against the node type value for comments, Node.COMMENT_NODE. Is there an easier way?

Answer 1

There's the TreeWalker APIs:

var tw = document.createTreeWalker(document, NodeFilter.SHOW_COMMENT, null, null),
    comment;
while (comment = tw.nextNode()) {
    // ...
}

This isn't supported by IE8 and lower.

T.J. in the comments provided a link to the specs. I kind of always use just TreeWalkers, but in your case a NodeIterator is fine too.