Node: textContent property - Web APIs | MDN (original) (raw)

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The textContent property of the Nodeinterface represents the text content of the node and its descendants.

Note: textContent and HTMLElement.innerText are easily confused, but the two properties are different in important ways.

Value

A string, or null. Its value depends on the situation:

• If the node is a document or a doctype,textContent returns null.
  **Note:**To get all of the text and CDATA data for the whole document, use document.documentElement.textContent.
• If the node is a CDATA section, a comment, a processing instruction, or a text node,textContent returns, or sets, the text inside the node, i.e., the Node.nodeValue.
• For other node types, textContent returns the concatenation of thetextContent of every child node, excluding comments and processing instructions. (This is an empty string if the node has no children.)

**Warning:**Setting textContent on a node removes all of the node's children and replaces them with a single text node with the given string value.

Differences from innerText

Don't get confused by the differences between Node.textContent andHTMLElement.innerText. Although the names seem similar, there are important differences:

• textContent gets the content of all elements, including