Question

I have an element like this:

<td>
  <a>anchor</a>
  [ some text ]
</td>

And i need to set it’s text in jQuery, without removing the anchor.

The element’s contents could vary in order (text before or after), and the actual text is unknown.

Thanks

New Update

This is what i came up using, assumes only a single text node:

    function setTextContents($elem, text) {
        $elem.contents().filter(function() {
            if (this.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE) {
                this.nodeValue = text;
            }
        });
    }

    setTextContents( $('td'), "new text");

Answer 1

Neal’s answer is my suggestion. jQuery doesn’t have a way to select text nodes How do I select text nodes with jQuery?.

Changing your HTML structure will make for the simplest code. If you can’t do it, you can just use the childNodes property looking for nodes of type 3 (TEXT_NODE)

Here’s some sample code that assumes the last node is the node you want to edit. This is a better approach than replacing the entire contents of the td because you could lose event handlers when you recreate the HTML

$('a').click(() => console.log('<a> was clicked'))

$('#btn').click(() =>
  $('.someClass').get(0).lastChild.nodeValue = " New Value");

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div class='someClass'>
  <a href="javascript:void(0)">anchor</a> [ some text ]
</div>

<button id='btn'> Change text without losing a tag's handler</button>