Question

What I’m attempting to do can be accomplished by the following…

elementContent = document.getElementById('docElement').innerHTML;
elementContent = parseFloat(elementContent);

or even by…

elementContent = parseFloat( document.getElementById('docElement').innerHTML );

but I can’t help to wonder if there’s a more elegant way to retrieve and assign DOM content as a float that I may be unaware of. Any insight?

Answer 1

There is the unary plus operator which tries to convert a string (or another type’s toString()) to a number. It would be used like:

elementContent = +document.getElementById('docElement').innerHTML;

As others have mentioned you can use jQuery as essentially syntactic sugar for .innerHTML here, also.