🚀 We are hiring! See open positions

How to find HTML elements by text with Cheerio and NodeJS?

by scrapecrow Oct 31, 2022
# nodejs

Using NodeJS' Cheerio we can find any HTML element by partial or exact text value using the :contains() pseudo selector:

const cheerio = require('cheerio');

const $ = cheerio.load(`
    <a>ignore</a>
<a href="http://example.com">link</a>
<a>ignore</a>
`);
console.log(
    $('a:contains("link")').text()
);
"link"

This selector is case sensitive so it might be dangerous to use in web scraping. Instead, it's advised to filter values by text:

const cheerio = require('cheerio');

const $ = cheerio.load(`
    <a>ignore</a>
<a href="http://example.com">Link</a>
<a>ignore</a>
`);

console.log(
    $('a').filter(
        (i, element) => { return $(element).text().toLowerCase().includes("link")}
    ).text()
);
"link"

Related Articles