Question

Let’s suppose I read the contents of a text node like so:

s = current_node.getSelection().anchorNode.nodeValue;

What is the best way to count how many characters are displayed on the webpage due to this one node? I know that for example   would be displayed as a literal string so no need to look for these. Is all I need to do then to count several spaces in a row as one character? Is there anything else I need to look out for?

Answer 1

You can ask the browser for the text version of what’s in the node like this:

var node = current_node.getSelection().anchorNode;
var text = node.textContent || node.innerText;
var length = text.length;

This will have already converted entities to their regular characters and will not include any HTML tags. Multiple spaces will come out as multiple spaces though – that’s just how this function in the browser works. If you were pretty sure that there were no multiple   sequences in the HTML, you could collapse the multiple spaces like this:

var node = current_node.getSelection().anchorNode;
var text = node.textContent || node.innerText;
text = text.replace(/ +/g, " ");
var length = text.length;

Example here: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/FpsGq/