Difference between innerText and textContent

getElementText.md

Difference between innerText and textContent

The differences between innerText and textContent methods are outlined in this Stack Overflow article.

• innerText -> implemented in IE8 and earlier. So innerText is probably not what you want.
• textContent -> DOM Level 3 - IE9 and W3C standards compliant browsers.
• Google Chrome implements both innerText and textContent.

Let's define a getElementText() method at load-time in order to use either textContent (preferably) or innerText depending on the browser running this code. This function will also trim the text.

  var getElementText = (function () {
    var parseEl = document.createElement('div');
    if (typeof parseEl.textContent != 'undefined') {
      return function (el) {
        return (el.textContent).replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '');
      };
    } else if (typeof parseEl.innerText != 'undefined') { // IE8 and earlier.
      return function (el) {
        return (el.innerText).replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '');
      };
    }
  }());