HTMLElement: innerText property

The innerText property of the HTMLElement interface represents the rendered text content of a node and its descendants.

As a getter, it approximates the text the user would get if they highlighted the contents of the element with the cursor and then copied it to the clipboard. As a setter this will replace the element's children with the given value, converting any line breaks into <br> elements.

Note: innerText is easily confused with Node.textContent, but there are important differences between the two. Basically, innerText is aware of the rendered appearance of text, while textContent is not.

Value

A string representing the rendered text content of an element.

If the element itself is not being rendered (for example, is detached from the document or is hidden from view), the returned value is the same as the Node.textContent property.

Warning: Setting innerText on a node removes all of the node's children and replaces them with a single text node with the given string value.

Examples

This example compares innerText with Node.textContent. Note how innerText is aware of things like <br> elements, and ignores hidden elements.

HTML

<h3>Source element:</h3>
<p id="source">
  <style>
    #source {
      color: red;
    }
    #text {
      text-transform: uppercase;
    }
  </style>
  <span id="text">
    Take a look at<br />
    how this text<br />
    is interpreted below.
  </span>
  <span style="display:none">HIDDEN TEXT</span>
</p>
<h3>Result of textContent:</h3>
<textarea id="textContentOutput" rows="6" cols="30" readonly>…</textarea>
<h3>Result of innerText:</h3>
<textarea id="innerTextOutput" rows="6" cols="30" readonly>…</textarea>

JavaScript

const source = document.getElementById("source");
const textContentOutput = document.getElementById("textContentOutput");
const innerTextOutput = document.getElementById("innerTextOutput");

textContentOutput.value = source.textContent;
innerTextOutput.value = source.innerText;

Result

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# the-innertext-idl-attribute

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also