Question

Possible Duplicate:
Getting the contents of an element WITHOUT its children

How can I get foobar out of the following HTML with jquery/javascript, without using regular expressions?

<div id="somediv">
foobar
<span></span>
</div>

Answer 1

Just use .text().

$("#somediv").text();

Or, if the span has content which you want to ignore, use:

$("#somediv").contents().first().text();