HTMLElement: innerText property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

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

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

js
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
# the-innertext-idl-attribute

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
innerText

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support

See also