• June 1st, 2009

    Hatin’ on textContent and innerText

    It’s surprisingly annoying to get just the text content of an html element in a cross-browser friendly way. I wrote Element#getTextContent() to take care of this simple operation for me.

    The Prototype Version:

    Element.addMethods({
  /**
   *  Element#getTextContent(@element) -> String
   *  Cross-browser means of getting Element#textContent or Element#innerText
   **/
  getTextContent: function(element) {
    if (!Object.isUndefined(element.textContent)) {
      return element.textContent;
    }
    return element.innerText;
  }
});

    The Procedural Version

    /**
 * Gets the text content of the specified element.
 * @param element {HTMLElement} The html element
 * @return {String} The string content of the specified element.
 */
function getTextContent(element) {
  if (typeof element.textContent != "undefined") {
    return element.textContent;
  }
  return element.innerText;
}

    Posted in Code/Projects, JavaScript | 6 Comments »

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