How to extract text from Link in Javascript?

Question

I have following string:

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com" target="_blank">StackOverFlow</a>

How can I extract text (ie StackOverFlow) from the string?

Answer 1

No regex required:

var t_ = document.createElement('div'),
    a;
t_.innerHTML = htmlString; // <- string containing your HTML
a = t_.children[0];

var text = a.textContent || a.innerText; // W3C vs IE

Actually parsing HTML with regular expressions is evil . Although it might be easy to come up with an expression for your specific case, it might not work well for a different string.

Answer 2

document.getElementById('link_id').innerHTML;

That was my solution before, user added more description but this is solution for current description

var s = '<a href="http://stackoverflow.com" target="_blank">StackOverFlow</a>';
var text = s.match(/<a[^\b>]+>(.+)[\<]\/a>/)[1];

Answer 3

If you can add an id to your link like so: `StackOverFlow" then you can get the text like this:

document.getElementById('linkID').innerHTML;

Answer 4

window.onload = function(){
    var text = '<a href="http://stackoverflow.com" target="_blank">StackOverFlow</a>';
    var parser = null;
    if (window.DOMParser){
        parser = new DOMParser();
        xmlDoc = parser.parseFromString(text,"text/xml");
    } else{ // Internet Explorer
        xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
        xmlDoc.async="false";
        xmlDoc.loadXML(text); 
    }
    var a = xmlDoc.childNodes[0];
    alert(a.childNodes[0].nodeValue);
}

http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_parser.asp