I need to clone an element's text, say an h1. I'm using jQuery's clone(), but I just want to copy the text and not the h1 tag so I can insert it into an h3 tag. I've tried using text() after the .clone(), but it doesn't work.

I need to clone an element's text, say an h1. I'm using jQuery's clone(), but I just want to copy the text and not the h1 tag so I can insert it into an h3 tag. I've tried using text() after the .clone(), but it doesn't work.

• javascript
• jquery

1 Answer 1

It depends what you're after, but it sounds like you just want to set the text to the same thing, like this:

$("h3").text($("h1").text());

The alternative is to .append() the .text() of the <h1>, which you can do directly like this:

$("h3").append($("h1").text());

But, as @bobince points out below this can be dangerous in some situations, let's take a simple one:

<h1>&lt;script&gt;alert("hi, I'm malicious script");&lt;/script&gt;</h1>

You can see it in action here...you can imagine how this could be problematic with some nasty script.