HTMLElement.innerText

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.

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.

Syntax

const renderedText = htmlElement.innerText
htmlElement.innerText = string

Value

A DOMString representing the rendered text content of an element. If the element itself is not being rendered (e.g detached from the document or is hidden from view), the returned value is the same as the Node.textContent property.

Example

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 (HTML)
# the-innertext-idl-attribute

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also