Using .text() to retrieve only text not nested in child tags

Question

If I have html like this:

    This is some text
    First span text
    

        

Answer 1

I presume this would be a fine solution also - if you want to get contents of all text nodes that are direct children of selected element.

$(selector).contents().filter(function(){ return this.nodeType == 3; }).text();

Note: jQuery documentation uses similar code to explain contents function: https://api.jquery.com/contents/

P.S. There's also a bit uglier way to do that, but this shows more in depth how things work, and allows for custom separator between text nodes (maybe you want a line break there)

$(selector).contents().filter(function(){ return this.nodeType == 3; }).map(function() { return this.nodeValue; }).toArray().join("");