How to get the entire document HTML as a string?

Question

Is there a way in JS to get the entire HTML within the html tags, as a string?

document.documentElement.??

Answer 1

I tried the various answers to see what is returned. I'm using the latest version of Chrome.

The suggestion document.documentElement.innerHTML; returned ...

Gaby's suggestion document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML; returned the same.

The suggestion document.documentElement.outerHTML; returned ... which is everything apart from the 'doctype'.

You can retrieve the doctype object with document.doctype; This returns an object, not a string, so if you need to extract the details as strings for all doctypes up to and including HTML5 it is described here: Get DocType of an HTML as string with Javascript

I only wanted HTML5, so the following was enough for me to create the whole document:

alert('' + '\n' + document.documentElement.outerHTML);