Question

Consider the snippet of HTML for a web page given below–

<div id="divText">Text 1
    <div id="divText1_1">Text 1_1</div>
    <div id="divText1_2">Text 1_2</div>
    <div id="divText1_3">Text 1_3</div>
    <div id="divText1_4">Text 1_4</div>
</div>

Now, if a user has selected the first 2 divs within the outer div (i.e. “Text 1_1” and “Text 1_2”), then there are nodes corresponding to the 2 divs -i.e. divText1_1 and divText1_2, also there are 2 text nodes for the 2 text snippets selected by the user.

However, in addition to these nodes (2 text and 2 divs ) there is also one more text node, that occurs before the second div node. From what I understand, because there are spaces after the end of first inner div and before the second outer div, this space is also considered as a text node by the browser.

What I want to know is, how do I filter out such nodes? In other words, what are all the possible values for such text nodes? null/ “”/ ” “/ other values? I would like to know all possible values so that I can correctly filter out such nodes

Answer 1

Text nodes always have a string as their value. If you want to filter out text nodes only containing white space characters, then you can trim the value and compare it against the empty string.