Text: splitText() method

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 splitText() method of the Text interface breaks the Text node into two nodes at the specified offset, keeping both nodes in the tree as siblings.

After the split, the current node contains all the content up to the specified offset point, and a newly created node of the same type contains the remaining text. The newly created node is returned to the caller. If the original node had a parent, the new node is inserted as the next sibling of the original node. If the offset is equal to the length of the original node, the newly created node has no data.

Separated text nodes can be concatenated using the Node.normalize() method.

Syntax

js
splitText(offset)

Parameters

offset

The index immediately before which to break the text node.

Return value

Returns the newly created Text node that contains the text after the specified offset point.

Exceptions

IndexSizeError DOMException

Thrown if the specified offset is negative or is greater than the number of 16-bit units in the node's text.

NoModificationAllowedError DOMException

Thrown if the node is read-only.

Example

In this example, the text of a <p> is split into two text nodes, and a <u> is inserted between them.

html
<p>foobar</p>
js
const p = document.querySelector("p");

// Get contents of <p> as a text node
const foobar = p.firstChild;

// Split 'foobar' into two text nodes, 'foo' and 'bar',
// and save 'bar' as a const
const bar = foobar.splitText(3);

// Create a <u> element containing ' new content '
const u = document.createElement("u");
u.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" new content "));

// Add <u> before 'bar'
p.insertBefore(u, bar);

// The result is: <p>foo<u> new content </u>bar</p>

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-text-splittext①

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
splitText

Legend

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Full support
Full support
See implementation notes.

See also