Get html element as string

Question

Possible duplicate:
jQuery get the html of the whole element

will say that I have:

<span>my span</span> 

I would like html as a string of this range

I use:

var mySpan = $('span');

what to do with mySpan var to result in the string "<span>my span</span>"

thanks for any help

Answer 1

I think this will help: http://jsfiddle.net/HxU7B/2/ .

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UPDATE

mySpan[0].outerHTML will take the previous selected node and get its own outerHTML property. Since older versions of Firefox do not have this property, we can use a bit of hacking to get html - just clone the node into a dummy div and then get that div innerHTML: $('<div/>').append(mySpan.clone()).html()

Answer 2

jQuery cannot do this, but regular JavaScript DOM objects can:

 var mySpanString = $('span').get(0).outerHTML; 

Answer 3

As others have stated, you can use outerHTML or a clone -> append -> html ()

But here is another way to do this,

 var nodeName = mySpan[0].nodeName.toLowerCase(); var outerHtml = "<"+nodeName +">"+mySpan.html()+"</"+nodeName +">";