Get the Text of an HTML element using JavaScript

Get the Text of an HTML element using JavaScript #

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.

index.html

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<!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.

index.js

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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 the concatenation of the text content of every child node, excluding comments.

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.

index.js

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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.

index.js

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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.
using textContent can prevent cross-site scripting attacks.

Because 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.

When you use 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.

index.js

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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.

In the example we added a string inside of the element, after its last child, however you can update the first parameter of the method depending on your use case.

The example also shows how to use the insertAdjacentHTML method, which takes the same first parameter as insertAdjacentText.

index.js

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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.

Get the Text of an HTML element using JavaScript

Get the Text of an HTML element using JavaScript #

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Borislav Hadzhiev