Doing A Deep Word Count Of A DIV?

One option that occurred to me is to loop through all nodes in the div and count the words in the nodeValue if it's a text node, or otherwise loop through the element's sub-nodes if it has them. You could do this recursively and therefore find all text nodes within the DIV and its sub-elements.The problem is this doesn't cover everything. Inputs and textareas have a value, not a nodeValue. You will want to ignore any "script" elements and perhaps others. Of course you can set up a list of exceptions and modify the algorithm a bit to allow for them.An attempt at the approach described so far is shown here: [URL]But what about select elements? Do you want the value or do you want the text inside the selected option? What if they're multi-select lists? etc.