Absolutely, let’s keep this engineering train rolling. Here comes Chapter 7 of the DOM Inspector Plus Guide — a focused look at the utility functions and helpers that glue the system together efficiently.

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🧩 Chapter 7: Utility Functions & Helpers

While the core of Inspector Plus lives in a single IIFE, there are a few purpose-built helper functions that make the logic cleaner and more expressive. This chapter documents the key utilities, what they do, and how they contribute to the overlay’s intelligence.

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🔗 getLink(prop): MDN Documentation Links

function getLink(prop) {
  return `https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/${prop}`;
}

• Generates a clickable URL for each inspected property.
• Used to wrap property names in anchor tags:

  <a href="..." target="_blank">property</a>
  

• Helps users learn about properties directly from the inspector.

📚 Consider evolving this to handle special cases (like classList, dataset, or attributes not on HTMLElement) in the future.

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📋 copyToClipboard(str)

function copyToClipboard(str) {
  navigator.clipboard.writeText(str).then(
    () => alert("Copied!"),
    () => alert("Failed to copy.")
  );
}

• Handles cross-browser, asynchronous clipboard access.
• Called when users hit the "Copy" button inside the overlay.
• Exports properties in a plain-text, human-readable format.

Example copied output:

input
  value: hello ← local
  checked: true ← attribute

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✅ tryParse(json): Safe JSON Parsing

This unnamed helper ensures that malformed localStorage entries don’t crash the inspector:

function tryParse(text) {
  try {
    return JSON.parse(text);
  } catch {
    return null;
  }
}

• Used when reading per-tag config from localStorage.
• Returns null safely if the string is not valid JSON.

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🎛️ renderOverlay(html)

Encapsulates the DOM injection and UI rendering logic:

function renderOverlay(html) {
  const existing = document.getElementById("dom-inspector-overlay");
  if (existing) existing.remove();

  const box = document.createElement("div");
  box.id = "dom-inspector-overlay";
  box.style.position = "fixed";
  box.style.bottom = "20px";
  // ... more styling ...
  box.innerHTML = html;

  document.body.appendChild(box);
}

• First removes any existing overlay so only one instance exists.
• Applies all styling via element.style inline.
• Appends the overlay to document.body.

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🧠 Why These Helpers Matter

These utilities:

• Keep main functions (inspect, readProps, etc.) focused
• Help with extensibility down the road (e.g. richer clipboard exports, deeper linking)
• Maintain graceful error handling and a clean separation of concerns

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Up next is Chapter 8: UI Behavior & Interactivity — where we’ll walk through how each button works (Edit, Reset, Copy), consider possible new features (toggles, modes), and talk about accessibility.

Shall I keep it going? You’re turning this from a clever script into a fully documented dev tool — something future you (and contributors) will thank you for 👨‍🔧📘