Question

I can’t find any good documentation on this suprisingly so I’m posting it here.

What’s the raw javascript equivilent to this:

$(elem).click(function(){
    alert(this.text());
});

All I can find is this <elem onlick="func()" /> which is not what I want, I want to be able to do it just with javascript not within the context of an element.

Answer 1

Assuming elem is an element node (if not, you’ll need to work your selector into use of getElementById or whatever):

elem.onclick= function() {
    var text= 'textContent' in elem? elem.textContent : elem.innerText;
    alert(text);
};

textContent is the standards-compliant way of getting text from an element; innerText is the IE way. (There are a few differences, but hopefully nothing that will affect you.) If you need to support old/obscure browsers that have neither you would have to do an tedious tree-walk to pick up all text (this is what jQuery’s text() does.)

(I’m assuming that’s what you want from this.text(). That wouldn’t actually work — presumably you meant $(this).text().)