Getting the contents of an element WITHOUT its children

Question

I have a mild preference in solving this in pure JS, but if the jQuery version is simpler, then jQuery is fine too. Effectively the situation is like this

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Answer 1

Pure JavaScript

In this pure JavaScript example, I account for the possibility of multiple text nodes that could be interleaved with other kinds of nodes. Pass a containing NodeList in from calling / client code.

function getText (nodeList, target)
{
    var trueTarget = target - 1;
    var length = nodeList.length; // Because you may have many child nodes.

    for (var i = 0; i < length; i++) {
        if ((nodeList[i].nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) && (i === trueTarget)) {
            return nodeList.childNodes[i].nodeValue;
        }
    }

    return null;
}

You might use this function to create a wrapper function that uses this one to accumulate multiple text values.