How can I pass in existing html content to initialize an instance of the editor?

[tolkienfan2]

When using LexicalComposer, the initialConfig accepts an editorState parameter that can be used to pass in some initial content. If this initialContent is a complex html string, I am not clear how to parse it. For a simple string, I have it like below (everything works fine here):

const initialState = () => {
  const paragraph = $createParagraphNode();
  const text = $createTextNode(initialContent);
  paragraph.append(text);
  const root = $getRoot().append(paragraph);
  root.selectEnd();};

const initialConfig = {
   namespace: 'HTMLEditor',
   theme: editorTheme,
   onError: (error: Error) => {
	throw error;
   },
  editorState: initialState};

Which I then pass in to LexicalComposer. If the string I pass in is NOT a simple string, but rather some html content in the form of a string, and if I do NOT know ahead of time exactly what will be passed in (i.e. I want to parse existing html content created elsewhere) how do I do it? I can't use $generateNodesFromDOM because my editor hasn't yet been initialized.

[acywatson]

I can't use $generateNodesFromDOM because my editor hasn't yet been initialized.

I'm not sure what this means - have you tried it? If so, where does it fail? I would expect it to work.