Is there a way to get innerText of only the top element (and ignore the child element's innerText)?

Question

Is there a way to get innerText of only the top element (and ignore the child element\'s innerText) ?

Example:

 
   top node text 
   <         


        
      

Answer 1

1. Clone the element.
2. Loop through all child nodes (backwards, to avoid conflicts):
   If the element has a tagName attribute, then it's an element: Remove the node.
3. Use innerText to get the textual contents (with fallback to textContent, when innerText is not supported).

Code:

var elem = document.getElementById('theelement');
elem = elem.cloneNode(true);
for (var i=elem.childNodes.length-1; i>=0; i--) {
    if (elem.childNodes[i].tagName) elem.removeChild(elem.childNodes[i]);
}
var innerText = elem['innerText' in elem ? 'innerText' : 'textContent'];