I'm trying to scrape text from an HTML string by using container.innerText || container.textContent where container is the element from which I want to extract text.

Usually, the text I want to extract is located in <p> tags. So for the HTML below as an example:

<div id="container">
    <p>This is the first sentence.</p>
    <p>This is the second sentence.</p>
</div>

Using

var container = document.getElementById("container");
var text = container.innerText || container.textContent; // the text I want

will return This is the first sentence.This is the second sentence. without a space between the first period and the start of the second sentence.

My overall goal is to parse text using the Stanford CoreNLP, but its parser cannot detect that these are 2 sentences because they are not separated by a space. Is there a better way of extracting text from HTML such that the sentences are separated by a space character?

The HTML I'm parsing will have the text I want mostly in <p> tags, but the HTML may also contain <img>, <a>, and other tags embeeded between <p> tags.

I'm trying to scrape text from an HTML string by using container.innerText || container.textContent where container is the element from which I want to extract text.

Usually, the text I want to extract is located in <p> tags. So for the HTML below as an example:

<div id="container">
    <p>This is the first sentence.</p>
    <p>This is the second sentence.</p>
</div>

Using

var container = document.getElementById("container");
var text = container.innerText || container.textContent; // the text I want

will return This is the first sentence.This is the second sentence. without a space between the first period and the start of the second sentence.

My overall goal is to parse text using the Stanford CoreNLP, but its parser cannot detect that these are 2 sentences because they are not separated by a space. Is there a better way of extracting text from HTML such that the sentences are separated by a space character?

The HTML I'm parsing will have the text I want mostly in <p> tags, but the HTML may also contain <img>, <a>, and other tags embeeded between <p> tags.

• javascript
• jquery
• html
• regex
• html-parsing

• Any purpose of jQuery tag? – A. Wolff Commented Nov 24, 2014 at 18:30

4 Answers 4

As a dirty hack, try using this:

container.innerHTML.replace(/<.*?>/g," ").replace(/ +/g," ");

This will replace all tags with a space, then collapse multiple spaces into a single one.

Note that if there is a > inside an attribute value, this will mess you up. Avoiding this problem will require more elaborate parsing, such as looping through all text nodes and putting them together.

Longer but more robust method:

function recurse(result, node) {
    var c = node.childNodes, l = c.length, i;
    for( i=0; i<l; i++) {
        if( c[i].nodeType == 3) result += c.nodeValue + " ";
        if( c[i].nodeType == 1) result = recurse(result, c[i]);
    }
    return result;
}
recurse(container);

Assuming I haven't made a stupid mistake, this will perform a depth-first search for text nodes, appending their contents to the result as it goes.

jQuery has the method text() that does what you want. Will this work for you?

I'm not sure if it fits for everything that's in your container but it works in my example. It will also take the text of a <a>-tag and appends it to the text.

Update 20.12.2020

If you're not using jQuery. You could implement the text method with vanilla js like this:

const nodes = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("#container"));
const text = nodes
  .filter((node) => !!node.textContent)
  .map((node) => node.textContent)
  .join(" ");

Using querySelectorAll("#container") to get every node in the container. Using Array.from so we can work with Array methods like filter, map & join.

Finally, generate the text by filtering out elements with-out textContent. Then use map to get each text and use join to add a space separator between the text.

$(function() {
    var textToParse = $('#container').text();
    $('#output').html(textToParse);
});

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis./ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="container">
    <p>This is the first sentence.</p>
    <p>This is the second sentence.</p>
    <img src="http://placehold.it/200x200" alt="Nice picture"></img>
    <p>Third sentence.</p>
</div>

<h2>output:</h2>
<div id="output"></div>

You may use jQuery to traverse down the elements.


Here is the code :

$(document).ready(function()
{
    var children = $("#container").find("*");
    var text = "";

    while (children.html() != undefined)
    {
        text += children.html()+"\n";
        children = children.next();
    }

    alert(text);
});

Here is the fiddle : http://jsfiddle/69wezyc5/

You can use the following function to extract and process the text as shown. It basically goes through all the children nodes of the target element and the child nodes of the child nodes and so on ... adding spaces at appropriate points:

function getInnerText( sel ) {
    var txt = '';
    $( sel ).contents().each(function() {
        var children = $(this).children();
        txt += ' ' + this.nodeType === 3 ? this.nodeValue : children.length ? getInnerText( this ) : $(this).text();
    });
    return txt;
}

function getInnerText( sel ) {
  var txt = '';
  $( sel ).contents().each(function() {
    var children = $(this).children();
    txt += ' ' + this.nodeType === 3 ? 
      this.nodeValue : children.length ? 
      getInnerText( this ) : $(this).text();
  });
  return txt;
}

alert( getInnerText( '#container' ) );

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis./ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="container">
    Some other sentence
    <p>This is the first sentence.</p>
    <p>This is the second sentence.</p>
</div>