Question

For this question I needed to find all text nodes under a particular node. I can do this like so:

function textNodesUnder(root){
  var textNodes = [];
  addTextNodes(root);
  [].forEach.call(root.querySelectorAll('*'),addTextNodes);
  return textNodes;

  function addTextNodes(el){
    textNodes = textNodes.concat(
      [].filter.call(el.childNodes,function(k){
        return k.nodeType==Node.TEXT_NODE;
      })
    );
  }
}

However, this seems inelegant in light of the fact that with XPath one could simply query for .//text() and be done with it.

What’s the simplest way to get all text nodes under a particular element in an HTML document, that works on IE9+, Safari5+, Chrome19+, Firefox12+, Opera11+?

"Simplest" is defined loosely as "efficient and short, without golfing".

Answer 1

Using createTreeWalker is a very efficient way of querying multiple nodes from the DOM.

/**
 * Retrieves an array of all text nodes under a given element.
 *
 * @param { Node } el - The element under which to search for text nodes.
 * @returns { Node[] } An array of text nodes found under the given element.
 */
function textNodesUnder(el) {
  const children = [] // Type: Node[]
  const walker = document.createTreeWalker(el, NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT)
  while(walker.nextNode()) {
    children.push(walker.currentNode)
  }
  return children
}

Note: A much more complete answer with multiple examples can be found here: getElementsByTagName() equivalent for textNodes