Does .previousSibling always return the parent's Text node first?

Question

I\'m stuck using native DOM methods (I know, right?) and I have a structure like this:

Answer 1

Does .previousSibling always return the parent's text node if it exists?

No. It returns the immediately preceding sibling. In your case, there is a text node (a new line) immediately preceding the a element, so it returns that.

If you remove the white space it should work as expected:

However, that's not a particularly nice solution. See @Esailija's answer for a nicer one!