Question

Is there some way of determining at run time, if an element returns value for element.text() or not? Using javascript or jquery?

I.E. some way of checking if an element is pure text, or it is some other type of element?

Why I need a solution to the above—

I am trying to parse through some complicated forms with totally different coding styles (in the way, for example, text values for elements of a radio button may be enclosed in label tags, or they may be directly given, or they may be enclosed in span tags, and so on…)

So I need to parse the form with the form id as wrapper,

now if the text value for a radio button is enclosed in span, and current selected element is radio button, then next element will be the span tag (opening) which I want to do nothing with and move on. The one after that will be the text, and this I want to obtain using this.text().

Hence the whole question…

Answer 1

You can use nodeType to check if an element is pure text (in which case its value will be 3)

<div id="wrapper"><input type='radio' />some text here</div>

$('#wrapper').contents().each(function()
                   {
                        alert(this.nodeType);
                   });

It will alert 1 (for input) and 3 (for text). For type=3, you can use text() to get text value

Note- It’ll also taken into account white spaces (as text nodes).