Change the type of element using jQuery

Question

If I know the ID of an element, is it possible to change the type of HTML tag that it has?

For example if you have <p id="p">Lots and lots of text here.</p>, is it possible to change it to <span id="p">....?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the replaceWith method to do this. You'll need to rebuild the attributes for the replacement though.

$('#p').replaceWith(function(){
   return '<span>' + $(this).contents().text() + '</span>';
});

Working example