How do you convert a jQuery object into a string?
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12 Answers
I assume you're asking for the full HTML string. If that's the case, something like this will do the trick:
$('<div>').append($('#item-of-interest').clone()).html();
This is explained in more depth here, but essentially you make a new node to wrap the item of interest, do the manipulations, remove it, and grab the HTML.
If you're just after a string representation, then go with new String(obj).
Update
I wrote the original answer in 2009. As of 2014, most major browsers now support outerHTML as a native property (see, for example, Firefox and Internet Explorer), so you can do:
$('#item-of-interest').prop('outerHTML');
12 Comments
Steve
It sucks that there isn't a method to just do this, but this is a great solution regardless.
ılǝ
this removes the head and body tags
John Feminella
@user85461 That isn't a valid DOM node, though, so it would be wrong to try to call outerHTML on it to begin with. (Only a tiny subset of what can go in
$(...) is a valid DOM node.)
zakius
@Moss it gives you inner html, or simplier, what is inside of element, while outerHtml gives you element as a whole
Oleg
Note, that you will lose
data |
Just use .get(0) to grab the native element, and get its outerHTML property:
var $elem = $('<a href="#">Some element</a>');
console.log("HTML is: " + $elem.get(0).outerHTML);
1 Comment
Rohit
So much better as it retains my attributes as well. Thanks!
Can you be a little more specific? If you're trying to get the HTML inside of a tag you can do something like this:
HTML snippet:
<p><b>This is some text</b></p>
jQuery:
var txt = $('p').html(); // Value of text is <b>This is some text</b>
Comments
The best way to find out what properties and methods are available to an HTML node (object) is to do something like:
console.log($("#my-node"));
From jQuery 1.6+ you can just use outerHTML to include the HTML tags in your string output:
var node = $("#my-node").outerHTML;
jQuery is up in here, so:
jQuery.fn.goodOLauterHTML= function() {
return $('<a></a>').append( this.clone() ).html();
}
Return all that HTML stuff:
$('div' /*elys with HTML text stuff that you want */ ).goodOLauterHTML(); // alerts tags and all
Comments
This seems to work fine for me:
$("#id")[0].outerHTML
1 Comment
mikong
I was also using this but this doesn't seem to work for Firefox 6.0.1.
The accepted answer doesn't cover text nodes (undefined is printed out).
This code snippet solves it:
var htmlElements = $('<p><a href="http://google.com">google</a></p>↵↵<p><a href="http://bing.com">bing</a></p>'),
htmlString = '';
htmlElements.each(function () {
var element = $(this).get(0);
if (element.nodeType === Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
htmlString += element.outerHTML;
}
else if (element.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) {
htmlString += element.nodeValue;
}
});
alert('String html: ' + htmlString);<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
1 Comment
Tom
Thanks man, the accepted answer did not work for me. Yours did!
No need to clone and add to the DOM to use .html(), you can do:
$('#item-of-interest').wrap('<div></div>').html()
2 Comments
David Thomas
But doesn't
wrap() return the wrapped element, not the element with which it was wrapped? So this should give the html of the #item-of-interest not it's parent div element (unless jQuery's changed since February of 2012).
skiss
Seeing this 10 years later. I just checked and you're right, the wrap is messing it up. It should have been $('#item-of-interest').wrap('<div></div>').parent().html(). But now there is the better native solution in the updated answer.
It may be possible to use the jQuery.makeArray(obj) utility function:
var obj = $('<p />',{'class':'className'}).html('peekaboo');
var objArr = $.makeArray(obj);
var plainText = objArr[0];
Comments
If you want to stringify an HTML element in order to pass it somewhere and parse it back to an element try by creating a unique query for the element:
// 'e' is a circular object that can't be stringify
var e = document.getElementById('MyElement')
// now 'e_str' is a unique query for this element that can be stringify
var e_str = e.tagName
+ ( e.id != "" ? "#" + e.id : "")
+ ( e.className != "" ? "." + e.className.replace(' ','.') : "");
//now you can stringify your element to JSON string
var e_json = JSON.stringify({
'element': e_str
})
than
//parse it back to an object
var obj = JSON.parse( e_json )
//finally connect the 'obj.element' varible to it's element
obj.element = document.querySelector( obj.element )
//now the 'obj.element' is the actual element and you can click it for example:
obj.element.click();
Comments
new String(myobj)
If you want to serialize the whole object to string, use JSON.
