Borislav Hadzhiev
Tue Jan 04 2022·2 min read
Photo by Mike Kotsch
Use the textContent
property to change the text of a heading element, e.g.
heading.textContent = 'Replacement heading text'
. The textContent
property
will set the text of the heading to the provided string, replacing any of the
existing content.
Here is the HTML for the examples in this article.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8" /> </head> <body> <h1 id="heading">Initial heading text</h1> <script src="index.js"></script> </body> </html>
And here is the related JavaScript code.
const heading = document.getElementById('heading'); // ✅ Change (replace) the text of the element heading.textContent = 'Replacement heading text'; // ✅ Change (replace) the content with HTML heading.innerHTML = `<span style="background-color: yellow">Replacement HTML</span>`; // ✅ Append / Prepend text to the element heading.insertAdjacentText('beforeend', ' appended text'); // ✅ Append / Prepend HTML to the element heading.insertAdjacentHTML( 'beforeend', `<span style="background-color: lime"> appended HTML</code>`, );
We used the
textContent
property on the h1
element to change its text content.
The textContent
property can also be used to read the text content of the
element and its descendants.
textContent
on an element, removes all of the element's children and replaces them with a single text node with the provided string.If you need to completely replace the HTML content of the heading, use the innerHTML property.
const heading = document.getElementById('heading'); // ✅ Change (replace) the content with HTML heading.innerHTML = `<span style="background-color: yellow">Replacement HTML</span>`;
The innerHTML
property gets or sets the HTML contained within the element.
By setting the property on an element, you effectively replace the HTML
previously contained in the h1
element.
If you need to append / prepend text to the existing content of the h1
element, use the insertAdjacentText
method instead.
const heading = document.getElementById('heading'); // ✅ Append / Prepend text to the element heading.insertAdjacentText('beforeend', ' appended text');
The insertAdjacentText method takes the following 2 parameters:
position
- the position relative to the element of where the text should be
inserted. Can be one of the following 4:beforebegin
- before the element itself.afterbegin
- just inside the element, before its first child.beforeend
- just inside the element, after its last child.afterend
- after the element itself.data
- the string from which to create a new text node to insert at the
given position.h1
element, before its last child, but you can change the value of the position
parameter depending on your use case.If you need to insert HTML to the heading, use the insertAdjacentHTML method.
const heading = document.getElementById('heading'); // ✅ Append / Prepend HTML to the element heading.insertAdjacentHTML( 'beforeend', `<span style="background-color: lime"> appended HTML</code>`, );
The first parameter the insertAdjacentHTML
method takes is the same as
insertAdjacentText
- the position at which the HTML should be inserted.
The second parameter is an HTML string containing the content you want to insert.