Question

I’m seeing this issue in Internet Explorer 8, but not in Safari or Firefox. So far, I have not tested in other IE versions.

I am developing my own jQuery plugin and, for this question, I’ve stripped it down to the two relevant lines.

---

In IE 8, using the code below, $('title').text() does not do anything. docTitle is blank because title is blank, as if the jQuery selector for <title>, $('title') is not working. (Again, AFAIK, this is just in IE 8)

(function ($) {
    $.fn.myPlugin = function (options) {

        var title = $('title').text(),
            docTitle = escape(title);

    };
})(jQuery);

http://jsfiddle.net/sparky672/YMBQ2/

---

However, using the plain JavaScript code below, document.title is working fine in everything including IE 8…

(function ($) {
    $.fn.myPlugin = function (options) {

        var docTitle = escape(document.title);

    };
})(jQuery);

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EDIT:

It does not matter that this code is inside a plugin.

Same result in IE 8 with this…

$(document).ready(function () {    
    var title = $('title').text();
    alert(title);
});

Just to clarify, I am not insisting on using this. In fact, I fixed my plugin by simply using document.title instead. If it wasn’t clear initially, I’m just asking why this does not work in IE 8.

---

Can anyone explain why, or what stupid mistake I may have made here?

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EDIT 2:

Here are some jQuery Bug reports on this issue

http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/7025

http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/5881

http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/2755

And dozens of others reporting the same thing. The official response is to state, “document.title is the only reliable cross-browser way and should be used instead” and the Ticket is closed. So there you go.

Answer 1

I guess jQuery iterates over all TextNodes and concatenates its nodeValue. IE stores this value differently than other browsers.

var title = document.getElementsByTagName('title')[ 0 ];
title.firstChild // This would be the Text-Object with the characterdata of the title
                 // Firefox: [object Text]
                 // IE: null

This should be the reason you cannot get the textContent with jQuery.text(). title.text seems to be cross browser comp. I only tested it in IE 7 and Firefox 3.6 but you can check the other browser if you like. But why not using document.title?