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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T09:33:18+00:00

Let say I have a mark up like this <html id=test> <body> Some text

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Let say I have a mark up like this

<html id="test">
<body>
Some text node.
<div class="cool"><span class="try">This is another text node.</span></div>
Yet another test node.
</body>
</html>

my js code

function countText(node){
 var counter = 0;
 if(node.nodeType === 3){
     counter+=node.nodeValue.length;
     countText(node);
 }
 else{}
}

Now if I want to count the text nodes

console.log("count text : " + countText(document.getElementById("test"));

this should return me the count but its not working and moreover what should I put in else condition.
I never used nodeType so kind of having problem using it . Any help will be appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are a couple of things wrong in your code:

    • Your HTML is malformed.
    • You are appending text to your counter instead of increasing it.
    • You never loop over the children of the a node, you always pass the same node to the recursive call.
    • You don’t do anything if a node is not a text node.

    This will work:

    function countText(node){
    var counter = 0;
    if(node.nodeType === 3){
        counter++;
    }
    else if(node.nodeType === 1) { // if it is an element node, 
       var children = node.childNodes;    // examine the children
       for(var i = children.length; i--; ) {
          counter += countText(children[i]);
       }
    }
    return counter;  
}

alert(countText(document.body));

    DEMO

    Which number corresponds to which node type can be found here.

    Update:

    If you want to count the words, you have to split each text node into words first. In the following I assume that words are separated by white spaces:

    if(node.nodeType === 3){
    counter = node.nodeValue.split(/\s+/g).length;
}

    Update 2

    I know you want to use a recursive function, but if you want to count the words only, then there is a much easier and more efficient way:

    function countWords(node){
    // gets the text of the node and all its descendants
    var text = node.innerText || node.textContent
    return text.split(/\s+/g).length;
}
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