How to get the text of a div which is not a part of any other container in JQuery?

Question

This should be real easy. Given below is the HTML.

    #Attachment#
    

        
      

Answer 1

Copied from my own answer on a similar thread

This example uses .contents() to get all the children nodes (including text nodes), then uses .map() to turn each child node into a string based on the nodeType. If the node is a text node (i.e. text not within the spans), we return its nodeValue.

This returns a jQuery set containing strings, so we call .get() to get a 'standard' array object that we can call .join() on.

// our 'div' that contains your code:
var $html = $("
\n    #Attachment#\n    #AttachmentName#\n    #AttachmentPath#\n
");

// Map the contents() into strings
$html.contents().map(function() { 
  // if the node is a textNode, use its nodeValue, otherwise empty string
  return this.nodeType == 3 ? this.nodeValue : ''; 
  // get the array, and join it together:
}).get().join('');

// " 
//     #Attachment# 
//     
//     
// "

If you want to trim extra whitespace, you can use $.trim(this.nodeValue)

If you need to do this a lot, you could even make a plugin (now with some options):

$.fn.directText = function(settings) {
   settings = $.extend({},$.fn.directText.defaults, settings);
   return this.contents().map(function() {
     if (this.nodeType != 3) return undefined; // remove non-text nodes
     var value = this.nodeValue;
     if (settings.trim) value = $.trim(value);
     if (!value.length) return undefined; // remove zero-length text nodes
     return value;
   }).get().join(settings.joinText);
};

$.fn.directText.defaults = {
   trim: true,
   joinText: ''
};