Idea Cheerio brings jQuery for the NodeJS without browser Cheerio parses markup and provides an API for traversing/manipulating the resulting data structure Installation npm i cheerio Example import * as cheerio from 'cheerio' function Component(props) { const ref = useRef() const addHeading = () => { const $ = cheerio.load('<h2 class="title">Hello world</h2>') $('h2.title').text('Heading') $.html() ref.current.innerHTML = $.html() } return ( <> <button onClick={addHeading}>add heading</button> <div ref={ref}>text in div</div> </> ) }