How to get plain text from an element in PrototypeJS?

Question

How can I get plain text from an element?

<div id="summary_header">
    <span class="heading" style="margin-left: 210px;">This is first line</span><br/>
    <span style="margin-left: 260px;"><b> You are in second line</b></span><br/>
</div>

What's the way to get plain text from this div tag? I want to get plain text as "This is first line You are in second line".

$('summary_header').textContent gives with white spaces.

Is their is any method in prototypeJs like jQuery text() method. — prasannaboga
– prasannaboga, Commented Jan 20, 2011 at 9:15

SWilk · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-20 11:38:18Z

4

If you need a method, no problem. That is the beauty of javascript and it's prototypal inheritance.

Prototype.js allows you to extend the Element object with new methods. Just add this to your scripts:

Element.addMethods({
    getText: function(element) {
        element = $(element);
        return element.innerHTML.strip().stripTags().replace(/\n/g,' ').replace(/\s+/g,' ');
    }
});

That is almost the same as @koko proposed, but I suggest changing each new line character \n to one space instead of removing them, and changing any number of consecutive withe-space characters to single space. This is similar behavior to what browsers do.

When you at that to your scripts, after the prototype.js loads, you can use new method to get plain text:

var plainText = $('summary_header').getText();

answered Jan 20, 2011 at 11:38

SWilk

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2 Comments

clockworkgeek Over a year ago

It would make sense to have the strip after stripTags since there might be extraneous whitespace inside those tags, and the two regular expressions can be collapsed into one: /[\n\s]+/g

SWilk Over a year ago

Right, both of your comments make sesne. Thanks. To much inspiration by koko's code...

koko · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-20 08:54:06Z

2

It's not very beautiful, but it works. I don't know what you're trying to achieve, but there you go:

var f = $('summary_header').innerHTML.strip().stripTags().replace(/\n/g,'').replace(/\s{2}/g,'');

http://jsfiddle.net/e8uFS/1/

answered Jan 20, 2011 at 8:54

koko

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2 Comments

prasannaboga Over a year ago

I need a method like text() in jQuery to get plain text form an element. Same way as in PrototypeJS

koko Over a year ago

prototypejs.org/api/string/stripTags and prototypejs.org/api/string/strip

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