Question

I need to build a string variable using jQuery to find all the text nodes surrounded by span tags. Importantly I need to separate each segment of text with the pipe character “|”.

For example take the following html:

<div id="myDiv">
<span>this</span> <span>is</span> <span>the</span> <span>text</span>
</div>

Using jQuery I need to produce the following:

var my_variable = "this|is|the|text";

So far I have the following jQuery statement but this just adds the pipe character at the end and doesn’t separate each segment of text.

var my_variable = $("#myDiv").find("span").text() + '|';

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Note: To remove the last pipe character at the end of the string I was going to use:

my_new_variable = "my_variable.slice(0, -1)";

Answer 1

You can use map() on the element of spans to get the text. Javascript arrays have a join() method that will put the pipes between them but first you need to convert your jQuery object into a Javascript array. Use $.makeArray() for this.

var my_variable = $.makeArray($("#myDiv span").map(function() {
  return $(this).text();
})).join("|");