Is there a way to get all text from the rendered page with JS?

Question

Is there an (unobtrusive, to the user) way to get all the text in a page with Javascript? I could get the HTML, parse it, remove all tags, etc, but I'm wondering if there's a way to get the text from the alread rendered page.

To clarify, I don't want to grab text from a selection, I want the entire page.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I suppose you could do something like this, if you don't mind loading jQuery.

var theText;
$('p,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5').each(function(){
  theText += $(this).text();
});

When its all done, "theText" should contain most of the text on the page. Add any relevant selectors I may have left out.