In jQuery, are there any function that similar to html() or text() but return the whole content of matched component?

Question

For example, if the match is

Hello world

, I need to return

Hello world         


        
      

Answer 1

@Jose Basilio's answer is great. But Brian Grinstead found a problem in this function when using IFrames: http://www.briangrinstead.com/blog/jquery-outerhtml-snippet

Here I put together Jose's way for also setting the outerHTML with Brian's solution for IFrames:

jQuery.fn.outerHTML = function(s) {
    if (s) {
        return this.before(s).remove();
    } else {
        var doc = this[0] ? this[0].ownerDocument : document;
        return jQuery('
', doc).append(this.eq(0).clone()).html();
    }
}