Jquery find all elements with text

Question

What would be the best way to scan trough all the DOM, find any element that have text and wrap it in a span class? Thanx

Answer 1

To wrap all text nodes that contain something other than just whitespace:

$('body *').contents().filter(function() { 
    return (this.nodeType == 3) && this.nodeValue.match(/\S/); 
}).wrap("<span />")

To wrap all text nodes, including those that contain only whitespace:

$('body *').contents().filter(function() { 
    return (this.nodeType == 3) && this.nodeValue.length > 0; 
}).wrap("<span />")

Answer 2

You can use .each to iterate over all elememnts:

$('*').each(function(){
    if($(this).text())
    {
        $(this).wrapInner('<span />');
    }
})

I didn't test that piece of code but it is quite simple. All you need to learn about is .each, wrapInner and * selector. jQuery docs is pretty helpful here.