Extract whitespace-collapsed text from html as it would be rendered - html

Question

I use an html parser (Neko) in order to extract the free-text of an html document.
Since I'm interested in text's semantic I must give special attention to the distance between words as it appears in browser.
for example:
<H1>My
title</H1>
<P>Hello
World</P>
Is rendered as:
My title
Hello world
While containing the paragraph inside <pre> tags or with style:
<style>
p { white-space:pre; }
</style>
would result:
My title
Hello
World
which I would like to treat differently since "Hello" for that matter is not semantically tied to the word "World". As said in other posts - there's a difference between what parsing does and what rendering does. I'm interested in the connection between words as it appears after rendering since obviously parsing doesn't collapse white-spaces as would been shown on browser.
Is there any way to extract whitespace-collapsed text from html as it's read on browser?

Answer 1

I have not used Neko before, but you will need to access the styles of the elements and see if the white-space property is set to either pre, pre-wrap, or preline.
If it is either pre or pre-wrap, replace any whitespace group in the text with a single space.
Else if pre-line, only replace groups of spaces/tabs with a single space.
Else, do not modify the text.
Here's an example using JQuery: JSFiddle
JQuery
function getRenderedText(obj) {
var text = obj.text();
var renderedText;
switch (obj.css('white-space')) {
case 'pre':
case 'pre-wrap':
renderedText = text;
break;
case 'pre-line':
renderedText = text.replace(/[ \t]+/,' ');
break;
default:
renderedText = text.replace(/\s+/,' ');
}
return renderedText;
}

Answer 2

Just look at this basic info on w3schools
http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_white-space.asp
and a bit better explained with examples:
http://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/w/whitespace/
i also think that you have to put hello in 1 <p> and world in another for the effect to work.
otherwise they both go to the right.