get opening tag including attributes - outerHTML without innerHTML

Question

I would like to retrieve a certain tag element with its attributes from the DOM. For example, from

<a href="#" class="class">
  link text
</a>

I want to get <a href="#" class="class">, optionally with a closing </a>, either as a string or some other object. In my opinion, this would be similar to retrieving the .outerHTML without the .innerHTML.

Finally, I need this to wrap some other elements via jQuery. I tried

var elem = $('#some-element').get(0);
$('#some-other-element').wrap(elem);

but .get() returns the DOM element including its content. Also

var elem = $('#some-element').get(0);
$('#some-other-element').wrap(elem.tagName).parent().attr(elem.attributes);

fails as elem.attributes returns a NamedNodeMap which does not work with jQuery's attr() and I was not able to convert it. Admitted that the above examples are not very senseful as they copy also the element's no-longer-unique ID. But is there any easy way? Thanks alot.

Answer 1

var wrapper = $('.class').clone().attr('id','').empty();

• You might want to change the selector to more exactly match the <a> element you're looking for.
• clone() creates a new copy of the matched element(s), optionally copying event handlers too.
• I used attr to clear the element's ID so that we don't duplicate IDs.
• empty() removes all child nodes (the 'innerHTML').

Answer 2

For future Googlers, there is a way to do this without jQuery:

tag = elem.outerHTML.slice(0, elem.outerHTML.indexOf(elem.innerHTML));

Since outerHTML contains the opening tag followed by a mirror of what innerHTML contains, we can substring the outerHTML from 0 (the beginning of the opening tag) to where the innerHTML begins (end of opening tag), and since innerHTML is a mirror of outerHTML, except for the opening tag, only the opening tag will be left!

This one works with <br> tags, <meta> tags, and other empty tags:

tag = elem.innerHTML ? elem.outerHTML.slice(0,elem.outerHTML.indexOf(elem.innerHTML)) : elem.outerHTML;

Because innerHTML would be empty in self-closing tags, and indexOf('') always returns 0, the above modification checks for the presence of innerHTML first.

Answer 3

Here is my solution:

opentag=elem.outerHTML.slice(0, elem.outerHTML.length-elem.innerHTML.length-elem.tagName.length-3);

I suppose, that close tag is of the form: "</"+elem.tagName+">".

Answer 4

Unfortunately, @AaronGillion's answer isn't reliable as I said in a comment. Thank @sus. I recommend his/her way with a little change to support <self-closing tags />:

function getOpenTag(element: HTMLElement): string {
    const outerHtml = element.outerHTML;
    const len = outerHtml.length;

    const openTagLength = outerHtml[len - 2] === '/' ? // Is self-closing tag?
            len :
            len - element.innerHTML.length - (element.tagName.length + 3);
    // As @sus said, (element.tagName.length + 3) is the length of closing tag. It's always `</${tagName}>`. Correct?

    return outerHtml.slice(0, openTagLength);
}

^{The code is in Typescript. Remve types (HTMLElement and number) if you want pure Javascript.}

Answer 5

Here's a solution I've used:

const wrap = document.createElement('div')
wrap.appendChild(target.cloneNode(true))
const openingTag = wrap.innerHTML.split('>')[0] + '>'