get the text content from a contenteditable div through javascript

Why not use textContent for this:

var contenteditable = document.querySelector('[contenteditable]'),
    text = contenteditable.textContent;

http://jsfiddle.net/E4W8y/1/

Unfortunately, I've found that innerText is the only way to preserve newlines in contenteditable dom nodes. What I'm doing (tested only in chrome at the moment) is this:

 var innerText = editableDiv.innerText  // using innerText here because it preserves newlines
 if(innerText[innerText.length-1] === '\n') 
     innerText = innerText.slice(0,-1)             // get rid of weird extra newline
 return innerText