textContent

TextContent is a property of DOM nodes that represents the textual content contained within a node and all of its descendants. It provides a simple, string-oriented view of a node’s text, excluding any HTML markup. The property is defined on the Node interface and is available on most node types, including elements, documents, and document fragments.

Getting textContent returns the concatenation of all text nodes in the node’s subtree, in document order. It preserves whitespace as it appears in the DOM and does not reflect CSS rendering or visibility; textContent may include text from script or style elements, since it includes all descendant text nodes.

Setting textContent replaces the node’s entire subtree with a single text node containing the given string. For example, setting element.textContent = 'Hello' removes all existing child nodes and inserts a single text node with that text. This makes textContent useful for sanitizing or updating textual content without parsing or constructing HTML.

textContent differs from innerText and innerHTML. innerHTML returns a string containing HTML markup and can be used to construct new markup when setting it. innerText returns the visible text as rendered in the layout, which can vary with styling and user agent behavior. In contrast, textContent is a straightforward, layout-agnostic representation of text nodes.

Compatibility and usage: textContent is widely supported in modern browsers and is part of the standard DOM API (DOM Level 3 Core). It is also available in server-side DOM implementations such as jsdom. Common caveats include its wholesale replacement behavior and the fact that it exposes all text nodes, including non-visible or script content.