Example

var text = document.createTextNode('Mmm ... something');

The example above creates a new Text node and saves it to the variable text. The node can then be added to an element like this:

element.appendChild(text);

The argument to createTextNode can only be plain text — you cannot pass entity references (for that you would need the createEntityReference method, which is poorly supported) — however you can pass unicode characters, such as \u00a0 for a non-breaking space.

Since the createTextNode method returns the created Text node, you can also use it directly as the argument to appendChild, which slightly reduces the amount of code (and typing!) involved:

element.appendChild(document.createTextNode('Mmm ... something'));