The Text.wholeText
read-only property returns the full text of all Text
nodes logically adjacent to the node. The text is concatenated in document order. This allows to specify any text node and obtain all adjacent text as a single string.
Syntax
str = textnode.wholeText;
Notes and example
Suppose you have the following simple paragraph within your webpage (with some whitespace added to aid formatting throughout the code samples here), whose DOM node is stored in the variable para
:
<p>Thru-hiking is great! <strong>No insipid election coverage!</strong>
However, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absentee_ballot">casting a
ballot</a> is tricky.</p>
You decide you don’t like the middle sentence, so you remove it:
para.removeChild(para.childNodes[1]);
Later, you decide to rephrase things to, “Thru-hiking is great, but casting a ballot is tricky.” while preserving the hyperlink. So you try this:
para.firstChild.data = "Thru-hiking is great, but ";
All set, right? Wrong! What happened was you removed the strong
element, but the removed sentence’s element separated two text nodes. One for the first sentence, and one for the first word of the last. Instead, you now effectively have this:
<p>Thru-hiking is great, but However, <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absentee_ballot">casting a
ballot</a> is tricky.</p>
You’d really prefer to treat all those adjacent text nodes as a single one. That’s where wholeText
comes in: if you have multiple adjacent text nodes, you can access the contents of all of them using wholeText
. Let’s pretend you never made that last mistake. In that case, we have:
assert(para.firstChild.wholeText == "Thru-hiking is great! However, ");
wholeText
is just a property of text nodes that returns the string of data making up all the adjacent (i.e. not separated by an element boundary) text nodes combined.
Now let’s return to our original problem. What we want is to be able to replace the whole text with new text. That’s where replaceWholeText()
comes in:
para.firstChild.replaceWholeText("Thru-hiking is great, but ");
We’re removing every adjacent text node (all the ones that constituted the whole text) but the one on which replaceWholeText()
is called, and we’re changing the remaining one to the new text. What we have now is this:
<p>Thru-hiking is great, but <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absentee_ballot">casting a
ballot</a> is tricky.</p>
Some uses of the whole-text functionality may be better served by using Node.textContent
, or the longstanding Element.innerHTML
; that’s fine and probably clearer in most circumstances. If you have to work with mixed content within an element, as seen here, wholeText
and replaceWholeText()
may be useful.
replaceWholeText()
is obsolete.
Specifications
Specification | Status | Comment |
DOMThe definition of 'Text.wholeText' in that specification. | Living Standard | No significant change. |
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core SpecificationThe definition of 'Text.wholeText' in that specification. | Obsolete | Initial definition. |
Browser compatibility
The compatibility table on this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.
Update compatibility data on GitHub
Desktop | Mobile | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
wholeText
|
Chrome
Full support 1 |
Edge
Full support 12 |
Firefox
Full support 3.5 |
IE
Full support Yes |
Opera
Full support Yes |
Safari
Full support Yes |
WebView Android
Full support Yes |
Chrome Android
? |
Firefox Android
Full support 4 |
Opera Android
Full support Yes |
Safari iOS
Full support Yes |
Samsung Internet Android
? |
Legend
- Full support
- Full support
- Compatibility unknown
- Compatibility unknown
See also
- The
Text
interface it belongs to.
Text.wholeText by Mozilla Contributors is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5.