jQuery get DOM element as string

Question

Say I have

$(\":input[type=text]:first\")

How do I get

Answer 1

Following on what @Blazemonger have answered, if you are going to send this html content to the server, it's worth to get rid of all unnecessary tags, white-spaces and line-breaks that don't add any value.

var quote = $(".invoice") //get hidden print-version DOM element
    .clone()
    .wrap('
')
    .parent()
    .html()
    .replace(/    /g, '') //get rid of indentation spaces
    .replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm, "") //get rid of line breaks
    .replace(//g, ""); //get rid of comment tags

My html had 50kb, after getting rid of this stuff, it got reduced to 4kb!