One answer: Use the technique you mentioned, or any of the techniques the
others suggested. They will all work and are all fine to use.
Another answer: In code that is performance critical, you may want to bypass
all that and go right to the metal.
Each of your "item" elements contains a single text node, whose nodeValue is
the text. So, if you have an item refernece, item.childNodes[0].nodeValue is
the text value, or even better, item.firstChild.nodeValue.
A test you can run in Firebug:
var $items = $('<items><item>Hello world!</item><item>Goodnight
moon!</item><items>');
var item = $items.find('item')[1];
// or any other code to get a single item, and then:
alert( item.firstChild.nodeValue ); // "Goodnight moon!"
This will change if there are other elements nested inside an item, but you
can always poke around in Firebug to see what's what. Do a console.log of
the node you're interested in, and look at its properties.
-Mike
> I am using jquery to parse some xml. I'm looking for the
> best practice to access an elements text contents.
>
> Let's say my xml looks like this:
>
> <items>
> <item>
> Hello world!
> </item>
> <item>
> Goodnight moon!
> </item>
> <items>
>
> I can get a wrapped set of the elements this way:
> $('items > item', xml)
>
> And I can get the text of element 1 this way:
> $('items > item:eq(1)', xml).text()
>
> But how do I get the contents once I am directly accessing
> the element instead of the jquery object?
>
> In other words I'd like to do something like this:
> $('items > item', xml)[1].text(), but since the element that's returned
> from the array [] doesn't support text() how do I get it's contents?
>
> I know I can wrap it in a second $ call, as in
> $($('items > item', xml)[1]).text() but that seems less than ideal.
>
> Thanks!
>
