jQuery text() call preserves newlines in Firefox but not in IE

Question

I\'m doing:

alert($(\"#div\").text());

on something like this:

<div>
Some text
<         


        
      

Answer 1

See here for a workaround:

The hack is to first clone the element you want the contents of, using cloneNode().

Next you create a

 element with
  createElement(), and then append your
  cloned node to it.

  
  
Now you can get the innerText of that
  create 
 element, and just delete
  the temporary objects. You now have
  whitespace preserved text :)


var cloned = targetElement.cloneNode(true);
var pre = document.createElement("pre");
pre.appendChild(cloned);
var textContent = pre.textContent ?
  pre.textContent : pre.innerText;
delete pre;
delete cloned;

  
  
The reason I clone the element is
  because the appendChild() would pull
  it out of the DOM and it's pain the
  re-insert back at the correct position
  in the DOM.
  
  
Hopefully this helps a few people out
  there :)