jQuery - Select everything except a single elements and its children?

Question

I\'m trying to remove everything in the whole body, except of a single element and its children. How can I accomplish this?

Edit 1 Consider the foll

Answer 1

This is an old question, but the accepted answer is wrong. It doesn't work in this situation (see http://jsfiddle.net/LVb3V/ ) and certainly not as a general solution.

Better to use:

$('body *').not('#div2, #div2 *').remove()​;

This will remove all elements in the body except for div2 and all the elements it contains.