Get a Div Value in JQuery

Question

I have a page containing the following div element:

<div id="myDiv" class="myDivClass" style="">Some Value</div>

How would I retrieve the value ("Some Value") either through JQuery or through standard JS? I tried:

var mb = document.getElementById("myDiv");

But the debugger console shows "mb is null". Just wondering how to retrieve this value.

---- UPDATE ---- When I try the suggestion I get: $ is not a function

This is part of a JQuery event handler where I am trying to read the value when I click a button. The handler function is working but it can't interpret the jQuery value it seems:

jQuery('#gregsButton').click( function() { var mb = $('#myDiv').text(); alert("Value of div is: " + mb.value); } );

Answer 1

$('#myDiv').text()

Although you'd be better off doing something like:

<div id="myDiv"><p>Some Text</p></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
   $(function(){
       var txt = $('#myDiv p').text();
       alert(txt);
    };
</script>

Make sure you're linking to your jQuery file too :)

Answer 2

if you div looks like this:

<div id="someId">Some Value</div>

you could retrieve it with jquery like this:

$('#someId').text()

Answer 3

myDivObj = document.getElementById("myDiv");
if ( myDivObj ) {
   alert ( myDivObj.innerHTML ); 
}else{
   alert ( "Alien Found" );
}

Above code will show the innerHTML, i.e if you have used html tags inside div then it will show even those too. probably this is not what you expected. So another solution is to use: innerText / textContent property [ thanx to bobince, see his comment ]

function showDivText(){
      divObj = document.getElementById("myDiv");
      if ( divObj ){
       if ( divObj.textContent ){ // FF
        alert ( divObj.textContent );
       }else{ // IE   
        alert ( divObj.innerText );  //alert ( divObj.innerHTML );
       } 
      }  
     }

Answer 4

You could use

jQuery('#gregsButton').click(function() { 
    var mb = jQuery('#myDiv').text(); 
    alert("Value of div is: " + mb); 
});

Looks like there may be a conflict with using the $. Remember that the variable 'mb' will not be accessible outside of the event handler. Also, the text() function returns a string, no need to get mb.value.

Answer 5

You could also use innerhtml to get the value within the tag....