Creating an SVG DOM element from a String

Reading and writing the innerHTML of an SVG within HTML seems to work well except in Internet Explorer (9-11): http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/IframeSVG.htm . If one needs IE compatibility (as in for a real web app) then use DOM methods to create a suitable container (object, iframe or embed) and build the SVG, one childNode at a time, through DOM methods within that container. ) It's a bit of a chore, but the basics are covered at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html#SVG_HTML.

Assuming you are using JavaScript, you can simply pass that string as the innerHTML of an existing element obtained via the DOM API:

var svg2 = "<svg ...> ... </svg>";
var container = document.getElementById("container");
container.innerHTML = svg2;

See: JSFiddle

I was building SVG chart and needed to enable user to pass any SVG to make it into a chart annotation. The solution was:

index.html - the root SVG element I am attaching child SVGs to

<svg id="chart_SVG" width="900" height="600" role="img" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"></svg>

api.ts - API to add annotation (written in TypeScript). x, y - coordinates where to place the annotation

function drawAnnotation(x: number, y: number, svgContent: string, svgId: string): SVGElement {
  const svgRoot = document.getElementById("chart_SVG");
  const svgNode = document.createRange().createContextualFragment(svgString);
  svgRoot.appendChild(svgNode);
  const newNode = this.svgRoot.lastChild as SVGElement;
  newNode.id = svgId;
  newNode.setAttribute("x", x.toString());
  newNode.setAttribute("y", y.toString());
  return newNode;
}

example.ts

drawAnnotation(
  100,
  100,
  '<svg><g><rect x="0" y="0" width="100%" height="100%" stroke="red" stroke-width="10" fill="orange"/><text x="50%" y="50%" dominant-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Verdana" font-size="24" fill="blue">TEXT</text></g></svg>',
  "myNewNode"
)

You can use DOMParser to parse an XML string.

var parser = new DOMParser();
var doc = parser.parseFromString(stringContainingXMLSource, "image/svg+xml");

The root element for the parsed string will be doc.documentElement

For this to work properly cross-browser you'll need to set the html namespace i.e. your string will need to look like this...

var svg2='<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="500" height="500" ...