Using jQuery to gather all text nodes from a wrapped set, separated by spaces
- by Bungle
I'm looking for a way to gather all of the text in a jQuery wrapped set, but I need to create spaces between sibling nodes that have no text nodes between them.
For example, consider this HTML:
<div>
<ul>
<li>List item #1.</li><li>List item #2.</li><li>List item #3.</li>
</ul>
</div>
If I simply use jQuery's text() method to gather the text content of the <div>, like such:
var $div = $('div'), text = $div.text().trim();
alert(text);
that produces the following text:
List item #1.List item #2.List item #3.
because there is no whitespace between each <li> element. What I'm actually looking for is this (note the single space between each sentence):
List item #1. List item #3. List item #3.
This suggest to me that I need to traverse the DOM nodes in the wrapped set, appending the text for each to a string, followed by a space. I tried the following code:
var $div = $('div'), text = '';
$div.find('*').each(function() {
text += $(this).text().trim() + ' ';
});
alert(text);
but this produced the following text:
This is list item #1.This is list item #2.This is list item #3. This is list item #1. This is list item #2. This is list item #3.
I assume this is because I'm iterating through every descendant of <div> and appending the text, so I'm getting the text nodes within both <ul> and each of its <li> children, leading to duplicated text.
I think I could probably find/write a plain JavaScript function to recursively walk the DOM of the wrapped set, gathering and appending text nodes - but is there a simpler way to do this using jQuery? Cross-browser consistency is very important.
Thanks for any help!
