CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascripthtmldom
sproketboy
sproketboy

Reputation: 9452

Finding untagged elements with javascript

Assuming I have some HTML with untagged content, e.g:

<html>
<body>
<p>text in a tag</p>
other text outside any tag
</body>
</html>

How can I get to the untagged element? Even document.getElementsByTagName('*') does not contain the untagged element.

TIA

Upvotes: 4

Views: 550

Answers (2)

vittore
vittore

Reputation: 17579

Just in your case you can do simply

document.getElementById('body').lastChild

However in a more general case you need to loop through children and check for 

a = document.getElementById('body').lastChild

console.log(a.nodeType) // 3
console.log(a.nodeName) // #text

Here is example on jsfiddle

Upvotes: 3

Simon West
Simon West

Reputation: 3788

I would suggest using the .nodeType attribute which will return an integer value depending on the type of node returned. Text nodes return a value of 3. Element nodes return a value of 1 be warned however the Text inside your <p> counts as its own node with a nodeType of 3.

With this in mind if your looking for textNodes that are children to your body element something along the following lines should work.

var nodes = document.getElementByTagName('body').childNodes
for (i=0; i < nodes.length; i++)
{
 if(nodes.childNode[i].nodeType == 3)
 {
 //THIS NODE IS A TEXT NODE OF THE BODY ELEMENT
 //DO WHAT YOU NEED WITH IT
 }
}

MDN nodeType documentation

Upvotes: 1

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