Question

javascript how to preg match first word and last word from html?

for example, in the below sentence, I want get words The and underway. Thanks.

<p>The Stack Overflow 2011 community moderator election is underway</p>
//should consider the different html tags.

Answer 1

If the element is already in the document, you can get its text content and split it based on " ":

var text  = "textContent" in document.body ? "textContent" : "innerText",
    el    = document.getElementById("myElement"),
    arr   = el[text].split(" "),
    first = arr.shift(),
    last  = arr.pop();

alert("1st word is '"+first+"', last word is '"+last+"'.");

If it’s not already an element, make it one:

var arr, first, last,
    text  = "textContent" in document.body ? "textContent" : "innerText",
    html = "<p>The Stack Overflow 2011 community moderator election is underway</p>",
    el   = document.createElement("div");

el.innerHTML = html;
arr   = el[text].split(" "),
first = arr.shift(),
last  = arr.pop();

alert("1st word is '"+first+"', last word is '"+last+"'.");  

Note: this doesn’t take punctuation characters into account – you might want to remove some of them from the string with a simple regex before splitting. Also, if there is only a single word in the text, last will be undefined. If there are no words, 1st will be an empty string, "" and last will still be undefined.