Get and Set the Text Content of an Element

To set and get the text content of an element and its descendants, you use the textContent property of the element:

element.textContentCode language: CSS (css)

Note that the textContent strips all HTML tags before returning it.

The following example returns the text content of the element whose id is container:

const el = document.querySelector('#container');
console.log(el.textContent);Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

And the following sets the text content of the container element:

const el = document.querySelector('#container');
el.textContent = 'Just simple text';Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Most modern web browsers support the textContent property. IE8 uses the innerText instead.

If your web application supports IE8, you can use the following code to get the text content of an element:

const el = document.querySelector('#container');
const text = el.textContent || el.innerText;Code language: JavaScript (javascript)