Remove element with jQuery but leave text

Question

I've got some html that looks like this:

<div>
    <span class="red">red text</span> some more text <span class="blue">blue text</span>
</div>

What I want to do is use jQuery to remove all the spans within the div regardless of attached class, but leave the text within the span tags behind. So the final result will be:

<div>
    red text some more text blue text
</div>

I've tried to use the unwrap() method but it unwraps the div. I've also tried to remove the elements but that removes the elements and their text.

Answer 1

jQuery 1.4+

You don't want to unwrap the span, you want to unwrap its contents:

$("span").contents().unwrap();

Online Demo: http://jsbin.com/iyigi/edit

jQuery 1.2+

For earlier versions of jQuery, you could do the following:

$("span").each(function(){
  $(this).replaceWith( $(this).text() ); 
});

Online Demo: http://jsbin.com/iyigi/2/edit

Answer 2

Wouldn't a simple $('#my-div').text ($('#my-div').text ()) suffice, without resorting to unwrapping?