Question

I am trying to remove contents from 2 div elements without removing the div itself.

<div id='test'>

content I want to remove

    <div id='childDiv'>

      content I want to remove

   </div>

</div>

I want to keep childDiv and test div but removing their contents. How do I do that?

$('#test').empty() will remove childDiv too.

Answer 1

how about storing the childDiv then empty the parent, then put the inner child back?

$('#test').html($('#childDiv').html()) // didn't quite work

// this clears both divs and leaves only the structure
$('#test').html($('#childDiv').html("")); 

jsFiddle, check the resulting black line with chrome, inspect. http://jsfiddle.net/tbspn/