Question

Need to get all direct nodes from DOM element and don’t actually know, how it many and what kind they are.
.contents()?
Ok, let’s see..

$('<div />').html('<p>p</p>').contents() ->
[<p>​p​</p>​]

Ok.

$('<div />').html('textNode').contents() -> []

WTF?

$('<div />').html('textNode').append('another').contents() ->
["textNode", "another"]

Ok, so what about single text node?

Answer 1

I don’t know if this is helpful. A while ago I built a Document Fragment generator using JSON styled input. I also wrote a (somewhat working) reverse function for it so you could turn your nodeList into a JSON string.

https://gist.github.com/2313580

var reverseFunction = function(DOM /* DOM tree or nodeList */) {
    var tree = [];[].forEach.call(DOM, function(obj) {
        if (obj instanceof Text) {
            tree.push({
                'textContent': obj.textContent
            });
        } else {
            var tmp = {};
            tmp['tagName'] = obj.nodeName;
            for( var data in obj.dataset ) {
                tmp['data-' + data] = obj.dataset[data];
            }
            for (var i = 0, l = obj.attributes.length; i < l; i++) {
                var key = obj.attributes[i].name,
                    val;
                if (key.indexOf('data-') === -1) {
                    switch (key) {
                    case ('class'):
                        key = 'className';
                        break;
                    case ('style'):
                        val = {};
                        obj.attributes[i].value.split(';').forEach(function(rule) {
                            var parts = rule.split(':');
                            val[parts[0]] = parts[1];
                        });
                        break;
                    };
                    tmp[key] = val || obj.attributes[i].value;
                }
            }
            if (obj.childNodes.length > 0) {
                tmp['childNodes'] = reverseFunction(obj.childNodes);
            }
            tree.push(tmp);
        }
    });
    return tree;
};

This does find textNodes and separates them… You may be able to extract something from it.

Update: to answer a comment in your question above…

var div = document.createElement('div');
div.appendChild(document.createTextNode('dsf'));
console.log( div.childNodes.length, div.childNodes, div.childNodes[0].textContent);​

I hope this makes a bit more sense to you know. The array appears empty in the console but it is not. check the length and attempt to access it and you will see.