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

There is a way to do this without jQuery. This also 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.