get text of an element without children in javascript

Question

How do I get the text of an element without the children? Neither element.textContent nor element.innerText seem to be working.

HTML:

Answer 1

Just find the text nodes:

var element = document.getElementById('whatever'), text = '';
for (var i = 0; i < element.childNodes.length; ++i)
  if (element.childNodes[i].nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE)
    text += element.childNodes[i].textContent;

edit — if you want the text in descendant ("children") nodes, and (as is now apparent) you're using jQuery:

$.fn.allText = function() {
  var text = '';
  this.each(function() {
    $(this).contents().each(function() {
      if (this.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE)
        text += this.textContent;
      else if (this.nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE)
        text += $(this).allText();
    });
  });
  return text;
};

Hold on and I'll test that out :-) (seems to work)