Use jQuery to programmatically parse the text from an HTML element

If you ever run into a situation in which you need to programmatically remove the HTML tags from an HTML element in order to get the text contained within it, jQuery has a very nice option for this using the jQuery.text() method.  Here is a brutally simple example of how it works:

var htmlText = "<a href='#' target='_blank'>I need this text</a>";
var textINeed = $(htmlText).text();
alert(textINeed);

Naturally, real-life situations are going to be far more complex than this, but I thought this might get you pointed in the right direction.