textContent vs. innerText: Which One Should You Use?

innerText vs. textContent: Unraveling the Nuances

In the realm of web development, text manipulation is paramount. Two key properties in JavaScript, textContent and innerText, play a pivotal role in extracting and modifying text content from HTML elements. However, they exhibit distinct differences that warrant exploration.

Distinguishing the Two

The fundamental distinction between textContent and innerText lies in their representation of text content:

• innerText: Retrieves only the visible text content of an element, excluding hidden elements and HTML markup.
• textContent: Captures the entire text content of an element, including hidden elements and HTML tags.

Performance Considerations

Due to its reliance on layout information, innerText incurs a higher performance cost compared to textContent. This is especially evident for large or complex HTML structures.

Compatibility and Accessibility

textContent is universally supported across all Node objects, while innerText is available exclusively for HTMLElement objects.

Practical Application

In the provided code snippet, you can effectively use textContent to modify the visible text of the element:

var logo$ = document.getElementsByClassName('logo')[0];
logo$.textContent = "Example";

This will change the visible text of the logo element to "Example" without affecting any hidden elements or markup.

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