• 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 »

6 Comments »

  1. seb  |  July 13, 2009   9:39 am

    more prototype way :)

    getTextContent: function(element) {
  if (Object.isUndefined(element.textContent)) {
    return element.innerText;
  }
  return element.textContent;
}

  2. Dan Dean  |  July 13, 2009   9:45 am

    @seb: Good point! I always forget to use those Object methods. I’ll update my implementation.

  3. itska  |  July 22, 2009   10:52 am

    shuffle shuffle whine whine

  4. Dan Dean  |  August 6, 2009   10:32 pm

    @seb: I finally got around to updating this snippet using Object.isUndefined. Thanks again!

  5. Jonah Dempcy  |  January 5, 2010   11:59 am

    MooTools version:

    Element.prototype.getText = function() {
    return $defined(this.textContent) ? this.textContent : this.innerText;
};

    Though in MooTools you can just call get(‘text’) on an element.

  6. Dan Dean  |  January 5, 2010   12:05 pm

    @Jonah: That is nice and short. I think if I wrote this now I’d have started with the ternary format as well. What I don’t like about both of these, though, is the assumption that innerText exists…

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