[javascript] How to get the <html> tag HTML with JavaScript / jQuery?

Using $('html').html() I can get the HTML within the <html> tag (<head>, <body>, etc.). But how can I get the actual HTML of the <html> tag (with attributes)?

Alternatively, is it possible to get the entire HTML of the page (including doctype, <html>, etc.) with jQuery (or plain old JavaScript)?

This question is related to javascript jquery

The answer is


This is how to get the html DOM element purely with JS:

var htmlElement = document.getElementsByTagName("html")[0];

or

var htmlElement = document.querySelector("html");

And if you want to use jQuery to get attributes from it...

$(htmlElement).attr(INSERT-ATTRIBUTE-NAME);

In addition to some of the other answers, you could also access the HTML element via:

var htmlEl = document.body.parentNode;

Then you could get the inner HTML content:

var inner = htmlEl.innerHTML;

Doing so this way seems to be marginally faster. If you are just obtaining the HTML element, however, document.body.parentNode seems to be quite a bit faster.

After you have the HTML element, you can mess with the attributes with the getAttribute and setAttribute methods.

For the DOCTYPE, you could use document.doctype, which was elaborated upon in this question.


In jQuery:

var html_string = $('html').outerHTML()

In plain Javascript:

var html_string = document.documentElement.outerHTML

if you want to get an attribute of an HTML element with jQuery you can use .attr();

so $('html').attr('someAttribute'); will give you the value of someAttribute of the element html

http://api.jquery.com/attr/

Additionally:

there is a jQuery plugin here: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/getAttributes

that allows you to get all attributes from an HTML element