Question

For example, given the following HTML:

<a id="test" href="#">Text of A <span>(span text)</span></a>

Then jQuery('#test').text() will return 'Text of A (span text)', is there a way to get just 'Text of A ' (the text inside the <a> tag and not in it’s descendant <span> tag)?

Answer 1

Here is a link to a conversation that solves your problem:
select top level nodetext is not supported with jQuery?

Here is an excerpt:

$("#hello").clone().children().remove().end().text();