Borislav Hadzhiev
Tue Jan 04 2022·3 min read
Photo by Autri Taheri
Use the textContent
property to get the text of an html element, e.g.
const text = box.textContent
. The textContent
property returns the text
content of the element and its descendants. If the element is empty, an empty
string is returned.
Here is the HTML for the examples in this article.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8" /> </head> <body> <div id="box"> Apple, <span style="background-color: yellow">Banana</span>, Kiwi </div> <script src="index.js"></script> </body> </html>
And here is the related JavaScript code.
const box = document.getElementById('box'); // 👇️ Apple, Banana, Kiwi console.log(box.textContent); // 👇️ Apple, Banana, Kiwi console.log(box.innerText);
We used the textContent property to get the text content of the element and its descendants.
The property returns an empty string if the element on which it was accessed is empty.
You might get leading or trailing spaces when using textContent
depending on
the structure of your HTML. If you need to remove any leading or trailing
spaces, use the trim()
method.
const box = document.getElementById('box'); // 👇️ "Apple, Banana, Kiwi" console.log(box.textContent.trim());
The code snippet also showed that we can use the innerText property to get the text content of an element and its descendants.
const box = document.getElementById('box'); // 👇️ "Apple, Banana, Kiwi" console.log(box.innerText);
However, there are some important differences between the textContent
and
innerText
properties:
textContent
gets the content of all elements, including script
and
style
elements, whereas innerText
only gets the content of
"human-readable" elements.innerText
is aware of styling and does not return the text of hidden
elements, whereas textContent
does not take styles into consideration.textContent
can prevent cross-site scripting attacks.innerText
takes CSS styles into account, when the property is accessed, a reflow is triggered to ensure the styles are up-to-date.Reflows can be expensive and should be avoided when possible.
textContent
and innerText
to set the element's text content, the element's child nodes get removed.The child nodes of the element get replaced with a single text node with the provided string value.
If you need to set an element's text content, you should be using the insertAdjacentText method instead.
const box = document.getElementById('box'); // ✅ Update text content of element box.insertAdjacentText('beforeend', ', Mango'); // ✅ Update HTML content of element box.insertAdjacentHTML( 'beforeend', '<span style="background-color: lime">, Melon</span>', );
The insertAdjacentText
method does not remove the child nodes of the element
it was called on.
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.The example also shows how to use the insertAdjacentHTML
method, which takes
the same first parameter as insertAdjacentText
.
const box = document.getElementById('box'); // ✅ Update HTML content of element box.insertAdjacentHTML( 'beforeend', '<span style="background-color: lime">, Melon</span>', );
However, note that you shouldn't use user generated input without escaping it, because that leads to a cross-site scripting vulnerability.