Get the Text of a Label element using JavaScript

Get the Text of a Label element using JavaScript #

Use the textContent property to get the text of a label element, e.g. const text = label.textContent. The textContent property will return the text content of the label 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

Copied!
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />

    <style>
      .bg-aqua {
        background-color: aqua;
      }
    </style>
  </head>

  <body>
    <div>
      <label id="label" for="first_name"
        >What is your <span class="bg-aqua">first</span> name?</label
      >
      <input type="text" name="first_name" id="first_name" />
    </div>

    <script src="index.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

And here is the related JavaScript code.

index.js

Copied!
const label = document.getElementById('label');

// 👇️ What is your first name?
const result1 = label.textContent;
console.log(result1);

// 👇️ What is your first name?
const result2 = label.innerText;
console.log(result2);

We used the textContent property to get the text content of the label element and its descendants.

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

If the label element were empty, the property would return an empty string.

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

Copied!
const label = document.getElementById('label');

// 👇️ What is your first name?
const result1 = label.textContent.trim();
console.log(result1);

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

Copied!
const label = document.getElementById('label');

// 👇️ What is your first name?
const result2 = label.innerText;
console.log(result2);

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.

When using the textContent and innerText properties to update the text content of the element, 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, use the insertAdjacentText method instead.

index.js

Copied!
const label = document.getElementById('label');

// ✅ Update the text of label element
label.insertAdjacentText('beforeend', '?????');

// ✅ Update the HTML of label element
label.insertAdjacentHTML(
  'beforeend',
  '<span style="background-color: salmon">Some extra HTML here</span>',
);

The insertAdjacentText method does not remove the child nodes of the element it was called on.

The 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 to insert HTML into the label element.

The insertAdjacentHTML method takes the same first parameter as insertAdjacentText - the position where the content should be inserted.

index.js

Copied!
const label = document.getElementById('label');

// ✅ Update the HTML of label element
label.insertAdjacentHTML(
  'beforeend',
  '<span style="background-color: salmon">Some extra HTML here</span>',
);

Note that you shouldn't insert user input as HTML without escaping it.

This would leave you open to a cross-site scripting vulnerability.

Get the Text of a Label element using JavaScript

Get the Text of a Label element using JavaScript #

Borislav Hadzhiev