CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascripthtmldom
flea whale
flea whale

Reputation: 1803

How to count how many characters in text node are actually displayed on the webpage?

Let's suppose I read the contents of a text node like so:

s = current_node.getSelection().anchorNode.nodeValue;

What is the best way to count how many characters are displayed on the webpage due to this one node? I know that for example   would be displayed as a literal string so no need to look for these. Is all I need to do then to count several spaces in a row as one character? Is there anything else I need to look out for?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3752

Answers (2)

jfriend00
jfriend00

Reputation: 707318

You can ask the browser for the text version of what's in the node like this:

var node = current_node.getSelection().anchorNode;
var text = node.textContent || node.innerText;
var length = text.length;

This will have already converted entities to their regular characters and will not include any HTML tags. Multiple spaces will come out as multiple spaces though - that's just how this function in the browser works. If you were pretty sure that there were no multiple   sequences in the HTML, you could collapse the multiple spaces like this:

var node = current_node.getSelection().anchorNode;
var text = node.textContent || node.innerText;
text = text.replace(/ +/g, " ");
var length = text.length;

Example here: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/FpsGq/

Upvotes: 3

Ross Smith
Ross Smith

Reputation: 755

It depends on how literally you mean to define "displayed on the webpage". If the characters overflow a container with overflow: hidden, they won't be displayed on the webpage (due to their being hidden by a CSS rule).

Besides that, condensing a series of white spaces, ignoring escaped newlines and carriage returns (if that applies, like in <pre></pre>), and condensing escaped characters should be all you need. I can't think of any other edge cases at least.

Upvotes: 0

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