The textContent
property of the Node
interface 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.
Syntax
let text = someNode.textContent
someOtherNode.textContent = string
Value
A string or null
Description
The value of textContent
depends on the situation:
- If the node is a
document
or a Doctype,textContent
returnsnull
.Note: To get all of the text and CDATA data for the whole document, one could usedocument.documentElement.textContent
. - If the node is a CDATA section,
comment, processing
instruction, or text node,
textContent
returns the text inside the node, i.e., theNode.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.)
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
and
HTMLElement.innerText
. Although the names seem similar, there are
important differences:
textContent
gets the content of all elements, including<script>
and<style>
elements. In contrast,innerText
only shows “human-readable” elements.textContent
returns every element in the node. In contrast,innerText
is aware of styling and won’t return the text of “hidden” elements.- Moreover, since
innerText
takes CSS styles into account, reading the value ofinnerText
triggers a reflow to ensure up-to-date computed styles. (Reflows can be computationally expensive, and thus should be avoided when possible.)
- Moreover, since
- Unlike
textContent
, alteringinnerText
in Internet Explorer (version 11 and below) removes child nodes from the element and permanently destroys all descendant text nodes. It is impossible to insert the nodes again into any other element or into the same element after doing so.
Differences from innerHTML
Element.innerHTML
returns HTML, as its name indicates. Sometimes people
use innerHTML
to retrieve or write text inside an element, but
textContent
has better performance because its value is not parsed as
HTML.
Moreover, using textContent
can prevent XSS attacks.
Examples
Given this HTML fragment:
<div id="divA">This is <span>some</span> text!</div>
... you can use textContent
to get the element's text content:
let text = document.getElementById('divA').textContent;
// The text variable is now: 'This is some text!'
... or set the element's text content:
document.getElementById('divA').textContent = 'This text is different!';
// The HTML for divA is now:
// <div id="divA">This text is different!</div>
Specifications
Specification | Status | Comment |
---|---|---|
DOM The definition of 'Node.textContent' in that specification. |
Living Standard |
Browser compatibility
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