slindberg / jquery-visibletext

Small jQuery plugin for determining all visible text inside an element

jQuery visibleText plugin

This plugin adds the .visibleText() method to jQuery objects for finding the visible text contained within an element. The output differs from .text() in cases where child elements that contain text are visually hidden:

<div id="content">
  This is <span style="display:none;">not</span> useful.
</div>

$('#content').text(); // 'This is not useful.'

$('#content').visibleText(); // 'This is  useful.'

Visibility of an element is determined using jQuery's :visible selector. The plugin performs a full traversal of all child elements, recursively calling visibleText until text nodes are found, and therefore performs poorly when called on elements with a large number of descendants. Also note that visibleText will return an empty string when called directly on a text node selector.

See this Stack Overflow question for more details.

Install via bower:

$ bower install jquery-visibletext