Get text from anchor tag

Question

I have the following anchor tag

<a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> 

I know how to get the href from an anchor take:

alert($(this).attr("href")); 

But how do I get the text from the anchor tag, i.e. how do I get "Google"?

Answer 1

Use .text() for this:

alert($(this).text()); 

If you wanted the markup (.text() removes tags and such), use .html()

alert($(this).html()); 

In this case there's no difference, if instead you had this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/">Google <span>(External)</span></a> 

Then there would be:

$(this).text() //"Google (External)" $(this).html() //"Google <span>(External)</span>"