Use jQuery to get text of target

Charles Wyke-Smith picture Charles Wyke-Smith · Feb 6, 2013 · Viewed 29.7k times · Source

Trying to get the text of an event's target element from an unordered list

<ul>
  <li>Item 1</li>
  <li>Item 2</li>
  <li>Item 3</li>
</ul>

with code like this

$('ul').click(function() {
theEl=(event.target.text);
});

When I console log

event.target

it returns

 <li>Item 1</li>

and

event.target.text

returns undefined

I just want 'Item 1'. I know I have done this before - it must be late...thanks for any assistance :)

Answer

JeffB picture JeffB · Feb 6, 2013

Use jQuery's text function:

$(event.target).text()