jQuery - find a element inside a another element and getting it's html content

so a Ajax call will return some data as html.

I'm creating a element from this data with var comment = $("<ul />").html(data);

Now I want to get the html content from another element inside the comment element I just created above. I'm using var commentbody = comment.find(".comment-body").html();

This works, but the problem is that I get开发者_JS百科 the element's contents only. I want to get the element tags too.

How can I do that?

You can do this:

var commentbody = comment.find(".comment-body");

var outerHTML = commentbody[0].outerHTML || 
                          commentbody.clone().appendTo('<div>').parent().html();

Here you first find the .comment-body element you want. Then you access the DOM element with [0] and get its outerHTML property.

If it doesn't have an outerHTML property, then make a clone()^(docs) of it, appendTo()^(docs) a new <div>, traverse up to the parent()^(docs) <div> and get its html()^(docs) content.

This answer assumes there's only one .comment-body to be found.