Wrapping Text Nodes and Elements with JavaScript

When you work on a site that relies on a given JavaScript toolkit, you unintentionally end up trying to solve problems within the bounds of the toolkit and not the language.  Such was the case when I tried wrapping text (possibly including HTML elements) with a DIV element.  Imagine the following HTML:

This is some text and <a href="">a link</a>.

And say you want to turn that into the following:

<div>This is some text and <a href="">a link</a>.</div>

You could do a simple .innerHTML update on the parent but the problem with that is any event connections would be severed because innerHTML creates new elements from HTML.  Damn.  So it's time to retreat to basic JavaScript -- glory for some and failure for others.  Here's how to make it happen:

var newWrapper = document.createElement('div');
while(existingParent.firstChild) {
	newWrapper.appendChild(existingParent.firstChild);
}

Using a for loop wont work because childNodes is a live node collection, so moving it would affect the the indexes.  Instead we can do continuous firstChild checks on the parent until a falsy value is returned and then you know all children have been moved!