title: Jquery remove the innertext but preserve the html
body: <p>I have something like this.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div id="firstDiv"&gt;
      This is some text
      &lt;span id="firstSpan"&gt;First span text&lt;/span&gt;
      &lt;span id="secondSpan"&gt;Second span text&lt;/span&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to remove '<strong>This is some text</strong>' and need the html elements intact.</p>
  
  <p>I tried using something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>$("#firstDiv")
      .clone()    //clone the element
      .children() //select all the children
      .remove()   //remove all the children
      .end()  //again go back to selected element
      .text("");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But it didn't work.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to get (and possibly remove, via something like <code>.text(""))</code> just the free text within a tag, and not the text within its child tags?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks very much.</p>