Suppose I have an HTML document that looks like this: <pre class="prettyprint"><code><html lang="en"> ... </html> </code></pre> My question is: how to get the value of the attribute <code>lang</code> with jQuery? I've tried <code>$("html").attr("lang")</code> but it did not work... any suggestions?

Access the attribute directly, ex : <pre class="prettyprint"><code>$('html')[0].lang </code></pre>

You don't need to use jQuery for this. The easiest way to retrieve the <code>lang</code> attribute is to access the <code>lang</code> property on the read-only <code>documentElement</code> object: <pre class="prettyprint"><code>document.documentElement.lang; </code></pre>