Angular 4 Universal this.html.charCodeAt is not a function

Question

I am using Angular 4 Universal Starter and integrated all my Angular 2 code in this starter. Everything is working fine but in terminal I am getting this strange error. Not sure what the problem is

ERROR TypeError: this.html.charCodeAt is not a function at Preprocessor.advance (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:152260:24) at Tokenizer._consume (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:45694:30) at Tokenizer.getNextToken (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:45652:23) at Parser._runParsingLoop (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:102429:36) at Parser.parseFragment (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:102384:10) at Object.parseFragment (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:55136:19) at Parse5DomAdapter.setInnerHTML (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:53609:49) at Parse5DomAdapter.setProperty (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:53250:18) at EmulatedEncapsulationServerRenderer2.DefaultServerRenderer2.setProperty (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:54766:94) at setElementProperty (/home/user/node/project/dist/server.js:9982:19)

Its causing due to below code in server.js

Preprocessor.prototype.advance = function () {
    this.pos++;

    if (this.pos > this.lastCharPos) {
        if (!this.lastChunkWritten)
            this.endOfChunkHit = true;

        return $.EOF;
    }

    var cp = this.html.charCodeAt(this.pos); // Error Occurs here

    //NOTE: any U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters that immediately follow a U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) character
    //must be ignored.
    if (this.skipNextNewLine && cp === $.LINE_FEED) {
        this.skipNextNewLine = false;
        this._addGap();
        return this.advance();
    }

    //NOTE: all U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) characters must be converted to U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters
    if (cp === $.CARRIAGE_RETURN) {
        this.skipNextNewLine = true;
        return $.LINE_FEED;
    }

    this.skipNextNewLine = false;

    //OPTIMIZATION: first perform check if the code point in the allowed range that covers most common
    //HTML input (e.g. ASCII codes) to avoid performance-cost operations for high-range code points.
    return cp >= 0xD800 ? this._processHighRangeCodePoint(cp) : cp;
};

this.html typeof is returning "string" but just before error it is returning below object.

{ treeAdapter: 
   { createDocument: [Function],
     createDocumentFragment: [Function],
     createElement: [Function],
     createCommentNode: [Function],
     appendChild: [Function],
     insertBefore: [Function],
     setTemplateContent: [Function],
     getTemplateContent: [Function],
     setDocumentType: [Function],
     setDocumentMode: [Function],
     getDocumentMode: [Function],
     detachNode: [Function],
     insertText: [Function],
     insertTextBefore: [Function],
     adoptAttributes: [Function],
     getFirstChild: [Function],
     getChildNodes: [Function],
     getParentNode: [Function],
     getAttrList: [Function],
     getTagName: [Function],
     getNamespaceURI: [Function],
     getTextNodeContent: [Function],
     getCommentNodeContent: [Function],
     getDocumentTypeNodeName: [Function],
     getDocumentTypeNodePublicId: [Function],
     getDocumentTypeNodeSystemId: [Function],
     isTextNode: [Function],
     isCommentNode: [Function],
     isDocumentTypeNode: [Function],
     isElementNode: [Function] } }

Below is my universal server.ts

import 'zone.js/dist/zone-node';
import 'reflect-metadata';
import 'rxjs/Rx';
import * as express from 'express';
import { Request, Response } from 'express';
import { platformServer, renderModuleFactory } from '@angular/platform-server';
import { ServerAppModule } from './app/server-app.module';
import { ngExpressEngine } from '@nguniversal/express-engine';
import { ROUTES } from './routes';
import { enableProdMode } from '@angular/core';
enableProdMode();
const app = express();
const port = 4200;
const baseUrl = `http://localhost:${port}`;

app.engine('html', ngExpressEngine({
  bootstrap: ServerAppModule
}));

app.set('view engine', 'html');
app.set('views', 'src');

app.use('/', express.static('dist', {index: false}));

// ROUTES.forEach((route: string) => {
  app.get('/*', (req: Request, res: Response) => {
    console.time(`GET: ${req.originalUrl}`);
    res.render('../dist/index', {
      req: req,
      res: res
    });
    console.timeEnd(`GET: ${req.originalUrl}`);
  });
// });

app.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`Listening at ${baseUrl}`);
});

• Node: v6.9.2
• Angular: 4.1.0

Answer 1

I experienced the same error when using

<div [innerHTML]="someHtml"></div>

But I solved it with *ngIf="someHtml" like this

<div *ngIf="someHtml" [innerHTML]="someHtml"></div>

Hope this works for you as well!