JavaScript: how to count the characters of an html text?

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JavaScript: how to count the characters of an html text?

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#1 by (7 votes)

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The problem: I have a html formatted text and I need to count how many characters (ringtones for journalists) I have. I'll use JavaScript. Some solutions came to mind, but as this will be done repetitively, I decided to analyze better before leaving coding:

The most obvious: remove the tags. I need to find them, and create a new string without them. It seems to be slower and if the text is large it may require some memory.

Scroll through the string: I stop the count every time a tag is opened, and restart when it is closed. It appeals to me for simplicity, but rather primitive, perhaps slow in large strings.

Transform into an XML and traverse by adding the lengths of text nodes. I do not have a lot of practice, but it seems interesting because it will use the JavaScript core, maybe get faster and optimize memory usage accordingly.

Has anyone ever done anything like this? What is the best "approach" to the problem?

javascript html string xml

asked by anonymous 09.03.2015 / 15:22

1 answer

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score 7 · Accepted Answer

The solution is much simpler than you are thinking. You do not need to delete the tags, just take their text with the property textContent :

var elemento = document.querySelector('div');
// compatibilidade com IE antigo via innerText
var conteudo = elemento.textContent || elemento.innerText; 
alert(conteudo.length); // 1

<div><span>a</span></div>