How to get Value / Text of a List item Javascript

Question

how can i get the Value / Text of a <li> item ? I found on the internet much ways to get the value for a dropdown list. But not for a <li> item.

This is what I have tried so far:

var listt = document.getElementById('content1'); 
var selectedvalue = [listt.selectedIndex].text;

Answer 1

You can use the innerText property for most browsers, but the textContent property for Firefox:

<ul>
    <li id="myLi">Hello, world</li>
</ul>

var li = document.getElementById("myLi")
console.log(li.textContent || li.innerText);

Here is a fiddle to demonstrate.

If you are using jQuery (you say you are, but I see no evidence) it would be as simple as using the .text() function:

$("#myLi").text();

If your <li> contains HTML markup too, you may want that. In this case you need to use the innerHTML property:

document.getElementById("myLi").innerHTML;

Again, jQuery has it's own equivalent .html() which caters for all sorts of different browsers:

$("#myLi").html();

Answer 2

Assuming myLi is a reference to the <li> element you want to get the text of, it's as simple as:

myLi.innerText

Note that <li> elements don't have values, because they're not inputs. They have content which can be a string of text or HTML defining other page elements. If your <li> element contained other elements, and you wanted the HTML of those as a string, you could instead do:

myLi.innerHTML

What's the difference? Let's assume your HTML looked like this:

<li><span>Some text</span></li>

Then

console.log(myLi.innerHTML); // outputs: <span>Some text</span>
console.log(myLi.innerText); // outputs: Some text