how to change text value within an element?

Question

How do you change the text for all within the a to

continue reading

using jquery

Answer 1

Do it with jQuery inside of a document ready handler ($(fn))...

$('.post-read a').text('continue reading');

jsFiddle.

For the sake of it, here is how to do it without jQuery....

var anchor = document.getElementsByClassName('post-read')[0].getElementsByTagName('a')[0],
    textProperty;

if (anchor.textContent) {
    textProperty = 'textContent';
} else if (anchor.innerText) {
    textProperty = 'innerText';
}
anchor[textProperty] = 'continue reading';

jsFiddle.

This will work good for your piece of HTML, but it isn't too generic.

If you don't care about setting innerText property, you could use...

anchor.textContent = anchor.innerText = 'continue reading';

I wouldn't recommend it though.