$.fn.contents fails when passed an iframe that isn't in the main dom tree

[bob@…]

$(document.createElement('iframe')).contents();

Throws an exception when trying to access contentDocument on the iframe tag, which doesn't exist.

[Rick Waldron]

iframe's won't have a content window until they are attached to the dom

[anonymous]

The bug isn't that contentDocument doesn't exist, but that jQuery always expects it to. The correct behavior would be to return no elements or to return node.children (which will most likely be an empty array), not to throw an exception.

[dmethvin]

Does it make sense to do that? Seems like it's just masking the problem. Do you have a real-life use case?

[anonymous]

I'm writing a Radability clone that runs on the client, which transforms an arbitrary document before the browser renders it, and there are some transformations that I do on all of the text nodes rooted at a given node.

The way I initially tried to do that was:

$my_node.find('*').contents().each(function() {
    // do stuff
});

But whenever the subtree rooted at $my_node contained an iframe I would get an exception at an arbitrary point. I'm hacking around it by doing:

$my_node.find(':not(iframe)').contents().each(function() {
    /* do stuff */ 
}); 

but that feels wrong.