Extracting text from a contentEditable div

Question

I have a div set to contentEditable and styled with "white-space:pre" so it keeps things like linebreaks. In Safari, FF and IE, the div pretty much looks and works the same. All is well. What I want to do is extract the text from this div, but in such a way that will not lose the formatting -- specifically, the line breaks.

We are using jQuery, whose text() function basically does a pre-order DFS and glues together all the content in that branch of the DOM into a single lump. This loses the formatting.

I had a look at the html() function, but it seems that all three browsers do different things with the actual HTML that gets generated behind the scenes in my contentEditable div. Assuming I type this into my div:

1
2
3

These are the results:

Safari 4:

1
<div>2</div>
<div>3</div>

Firefox 3.6:

1
<br _moz_dirty="">
2
<br _moz_dirty="">
3
<br _moz_dirty="">
<br _moz_dirty="" type="_moz">

IE 8:

<P>1</P><P>2</P><P>3</P>

Ugh. Nothing very consistent here. The surprising thing is that MSIE looks the most sane! (Capitalized P tag and all)

The div will have dynamically set styling (font face, colour, size and alignment) which is done using CSS, so I'm not sure if I can use a pre tag (which was alluded to on some pages I found using Google).

Does anyone know of any JavaScript code and/or jQuery plugin or something that will extract text from a contentEditable div in such a way as to preserve linebreaks? I'd prefer not to reinvent a parsing wheel if I don't have to.

Update: I cribbed the getText function from jQuery 1.4.2 and modified it to extract it with whitespace mostly intact (I only chnaged one line where I add a newline);

function extractTextWithWhitespace( elems ) {
    var ret = "", elem;

    for ( var i = 0; elems[i]; i++ ) {
        elem = elems[i];

        // Get the text from text nodes and CDATA nodes
        if ( elem.nodeType === 3 || elem.nodeType === 4 ) {
            ret += elem.nodeValue + "\n";

        // Traverse everything else, except comment nodes
        } else if ( elem.nodeType !== 8 ) {
            ret += extractTextWithWhitespace2( elem.childNodes );
        }
    }

    return ret;
}

I call this function and use its output to assign it to an XML node with jQuery, something like:

var extractedText = extractTextWithWhitespace($(this));
var $someXmlNode = $('<someXmlNode/>');
$someXmlNode.text(extractedText);

The resulting XML is eventually sent to a server via an AJAX call.

This works well in Safari and Firefox.

On IE, only the first '\n' seems to get retained somehow. Looking into it more, it looks like jQuery is setting the text like so (line 4004 of jQuery-1.4.2.js):

return this.empty().append( (this[0] && this[0].ownerDocument || document).createTextNode( text ) );

Reading up on createTextNode, it appears that IE's implementation may mash up the whitespace. Is this true or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Unfortunately you do still have to handle this for the pre case individually per-browser (I don't condone browser detection in many cases, use feature detection...but in this case it's necessary), but luckily you can take care of them all pretty concisely, like this:

var ce = $("<pre />").html($("#edit").html());
if($.browser.webkit) 
  ce.find("div").replaceWith(function() { return "\n" + this.innerHTML; });    
if($.browser.msie) 
  ce.find("p").replaceWith(function() { return this.innerHTML  +  "<br>"; });
if($.browser.mozilla || $.browser.opera ||$.browser.msie )
  ce.find("br").replaceWith("\n");

var textWithWhiteSpaceIntact = ce.text();

You can test it out here. IE in particular is a hassle because of the way is does   and new lines in text conversion, that's why it gets the <br> treatment above to make it consistent, so it needs 2 passes to be handled correctly.

In the above #edit is the ID of the contentEditable component, so just change that out, or make this a function, for example:

function getContentEditableText(id) {
    var ce = $("<pre />").html($("#" + id).html());
    if ($.browser.webkit)
      ce.find("div").replaceWith(function() { return "\n" + this.innerHTML; });
    if ($.browser.msie)
      ce.find("p").replaceWith(function() { return this.innerHTML + "<br>"; });
    if ($.browser.mozilla || $.browser.opera || $.browser.msie)
      ce.find("br").replaceWith("\n");

    return ce.text();
}

You can test that here. Or, since this is built on jQuery methods anyway, make it a plugin, like this:

$.fn.getPreText = function () {
    var ce = $("<pre />").html(this.html());
    if ($.browser.webkit)
      ce.find("div").replaceWith(function() { return "\n" + this.innerHTML; });
    if ($.browser.msie)
      ce.find("p").replaceWith(function() { return this.innerHTML + "<br>"; });
    if ($.browser.mozilla || $.browser.opera || $.browser.msie)
      ce.find("br").replaceWith("\n");

    return ce.text();
};

Then you can just call it with $("#edit").getPreText(), you can test that version here.