How to select text before and after <br> in jQuery?

Question

How can I select texts that are not surrounded by HTML tags, but simply preceding and following <br> tags ?

I did it with xpath:

.xpath('//br/following-sibling::text()|//br/preceding-sibling::text()')

Answer 1

var text = "";

$("br").parent().contents().each(function(i) {
    if(this.nodeName == "#text")
    {
        text += this.textContent;
    }
});

alert(text);

--->

<span>bla bla bl<br/>a bla...</span> --> bla bla bla bla...