Cannot access document's title element with jQuery (IE 8)

Question

I\'m seeing this issue in Internet Explorer 8, but not in Safari or Firefox. So far, I have not tested in other IE versions.

I am developing my own jQuery plugin an

Answer 1

try using $('title').html() which should work in all browsers

Answer 2

I guess jQuery iterates over all TextNodes and concatenates its nodeValue. IE stores this value differently than other browsers.

var title = document.getElementsByTagName('title')[ 0 ];
title.firstChild // This would be the Text-Object with the characterdata of the title
                 // Firefox: [object Text]
                 // IE: null

This should be the reason you cannot get the textContent with jQuery.text(). title.text seems to be cross browser comp. I only tested it in IE 7 and Firefox 3.6 but you can check the other browser if you like. But why not using document.title?