Feature Request: enhance Cheerio.text() to support children of doms

[MorganConrad]

I've been working a lot with Cheerio and tables. Say I have used Cheerio to select a table row, and then get all the tds, and want to grab text out of some of them.

var tds = tableRow.children('td');

Yes, to get text from the nth td I can go

tds.eq(n).text();

but that requires an (unnecessary, looking at the code) .make() and object allocation. So, in perhaps a bit of over optimization, I've been doing

$.text(tds[n].children);

Which works fine, but it is extra typing and requires "inner knowldege" of the .children field. I'd prefer to use something like:

$text(tds[n]);

Now, tds[n] does not have a .length field, so you'd have to slightly modify static.js. I think that doing

var text = exports.text = function(elems) {
    if (!elems) return '';

    if (!elems.length) return text(elems.children);

would do the trick? But you could implement how you prefer...

[jugglinmike]

Because we are interested in enabling code sharing between the client and the server, we prioritize consistency with the jQuery API. That means we're unlikely to implement this feature request.

If your benchmarks are showing that the additional call to the internal _make method is having a appreciable impact on performance, you could try modifying your selector to something like td > *. Of course, this has its own performance implications, but depending on your markup, this may be a better approach.

Alternatively, you may be interested in gh-561 since this introduces the standard DOM node API for childNodes--$.text(tds[n].childNodes) is equivalent to what you've proposed, but it doesn't rely on proprietary/internal details.