Question

I’m trying to parse some of html where there is are repeating lines of code such as:

<a>This is <span>some text</span> but its <span>not grabbing the span</span> content</a>

So I am looping through the object and extracting this:

object.a[i].text();

but its only returning

"This is  but its  content"

How do I grab the text within the children nodes as well, all as one string?

Cheers

Answer 1

I don’t know E4X, but may I assume pure JavaScript is alright?

textContent doesn’t seem to have great compatibility for IE prior to version 9. This works when textContent is available. However I do not have IE8 so I cannot test with it, but this should work as well.

var obj = (!object.a[i].innerText) ? object.a[i].textContent : object.a[i].innerText;

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That works in a client side implementation, but since it’s not working in your implementation I guess you’re going to need something more specific to your setup; unfortunately there’s not much I can do there. I will however give one more pure JS stab at it. This iterates through each child node of object.a[i], determines if it is a textNode or elementNode and pulls data or innerHTML respectively.

var doesThisWork = '';
var children = object.a[i].childNodes;
for(x in children){
doesThisWork += (children[x].nodeType === 1) ? children[x].innerHTML : children[x].data;
}

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I’ll leave the jQuery version:

.contents:

object.a[i].contents().text();