[jQuery] Getting .html() AND the container element

[jQuery] Getting .html() AND the container element


(Apologies of this double-posts somehow; lots of trouble with Google
Groups earlier, haven't seen the message come up yet, so:)
For an Ajax application I'm working on, I need to POST the HTML
contents of an element including the element itself. So if I have
<div class="example" id="example10">
Lorem ipsum <strong>dolor sit amet</strong>.
</div>
I need to grab that entire bit as a single string, including the first
div and it's attributes.
The only way I can figure to do this is to .wrap() the entire element
in another div, then get the .html() of that wrapper, then remove the
wrapper. This feels clumsy and inefficient for a pretty
straightforward task, and messes with the DOM a bit more than I'd like
(the changes can theoretically mess with the page layout on the
viewer's end). Is there a better way to do this?