Screen Scrape Static Content

Question

I have a counter on a website whose value I'd like to access using Javascript.

The code I'm trying to reference looks like this:

<span id="counter">
0123 // This is the value I'm trying to access
</span>

What would be the best way to easily access this value? Screen scraping seems to be overly complex. Thanks!

Answer 1

var el = document.getElementById('counter'),
    // innerText for IE, textContent for other browsers.
    value = el.textContent || el.innerText || '';
alert(value);