How to remove all classes with jQuery?

Question

I have some up/down buttons that increase/decrease the size of the selected text by adding a class to the containing element, like

<span class="font20">Some text</span>

The font20 class sets font-size:20px, font21 sets font-size: 21, etc.

I have another button "Clear Formatting" that needs to remove any classes I added. I could go through and see if font20 is applied and remove it if it is. If not, see if font21 is applied and remove it if it is, etc. and go through 50 or so possibilities. But what I'd rather do is something like

jQuery('selector').removeClass("*");

That is, remove all classes that may have been added. The removeClass("*") above doesn't seem to work. Is there another way to remove all the classes applied to a selector, using jQuery?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Just use

jQuery('selector').removeClass();

to remove all the classes.

Answer 2

From the documentation:

If a class name is included as a parameter, then only that class will be removed from the set of matched elements. If no class names are specified in the parameter, all classes will be removed.

So simply using:

$('#whatever').removeClass();

will remove all classes from #whatever.