jQuery Extension: toggleText() method

Skip straight to the demo.

Here’s a situation I have run into multiple times: I have a hidden area that is toggled by a link.  The link will usually say “Show *”, and once it is clicked it will say “Hide *”.  I would usually just check the text when the link is clicked and switch it.  Similar to the following:

    var $self = $(this);
    if ($self.text() == "Show items")
       $self.text("Hide items");
        $self.text("Show items");

It would get tedious to add this to every link that toggled the view on an element.  In order to make it easier on myself I threw together a little extension for jQuery.  You pass it 2 string values representing the text that you would like to toggle.  Here is an example usage that does the same thing as the code block above:

    $(this).toggleText("Show", "Hide");

The extension looks for the first value in the element’s text and if it exists, it is replaced with the second value.  If the first value doesn’t exist in the element’s text, it looks for the second value in the text and replaces it with the first value.   Here is the source:

jQuery.fn.toggleText = function (value1, value2) {
    return this.each(function () {
        var $this = $(this),
            text = $this.text();

        if (text.indexOf(value1) > -1)
            $this.text(text.replace(value1, value2));
            $this.text(text.replace(value2, value1));

To see it in action, you can view the demo.

jQuery Extension: toggleText() method

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