Nearly all jQuery traversal functions ignore elements that are not HTML tags.

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To work with other type of nodes (like text, comment or CDATA sections) you need to:

• Retrieve child nodes contents() (which behaves like children() except that it returns all types of child nodes)
• Filter manually using either plain Javascript or jQuery's filter() method

Example

Let's write a function that takes a jQuery element and returns an array of all child nodes that are text nodes:

function selectTextNodes($container) {
  return $container.contents().filter(function() {
    return this.nodeType === 3;
  });
}

Also check out this list of existing node types Show archive.org snapshot . 1 is HTML tag, 3 is text, 8 is comment, etc.