Question

I created a DOM fragment using JQuery:

var $content = $("<div /", {id:"content"})

I want to output the fragment as a string, so I attempted:

$content.html();

That returns an empty string, because there are no children. How can I return a string containing:

<div id="content" />

Answer 1

jQuery doesn’t have anything in its API to do this directly, but you can use the native .outerHTML property.

$content[0].outerHTML

…but Firefox doesn’t support this, so you can do something like this…

$content[0].outerHTML || $('<div>').append($content.clone()).html();

http://jsfiddle.net/m22fn/

Note that a <div> tag doesn’t self-close.