Question

I have various a elements that i get with this jQuery selector:

$("#toc").find("li a")

If one element text is “first second” (and all elements’ text are two words divided by a space) I want to show only the first word, in this example the element’s text should be first, is this possible?

Answer 1

You could wrap the second word in a span, and hide that:

$('#toc li a').html( function(i, h) {
    var words = h.split(/\s/);
    return words[0] + ' <span>' + words[1] + '</span>';
});

JS Fiddle demo.

With the CSS:

#toc li a span {
    display: none;
}

To address situations where there might be more than two words:

$('#toc li a').html( function(i, h) {
    var words = h.split(/\s/);
    return words[0] + ' <span>' + words.slice(1).join(' ') + '</span>';
});

JS Fiddle demo.