How to move an element into another element?

Question

I would like to move one DIV element inside another. For example, I want to move this (including all children):

<div id="source">
...
</div>

into this:

<div id="destination">
...
</div>

so that I have this:

<div id="destination">
  <div id="source">
    ...
  </div>
</div>

Answer 1

You can use:

To Insert After,

jQuery("#source").insertAfter("#destination");

To Insert inside another element,

jQuery("#source").appendTo("#destination");

Answer 2

I just used:

$('#source').prependTo('#destination');

Which I grabbed from here.

Answer 3

For the sake of completeness, there is another approach wrap() or wrapAll() mentioned in this article. So the OP's question could possibly be solved by this (that is, assuming the <div id="destination" /> does not yet exist, the following approach will create such a wrapper from scratch - the OP was not clear about whether the wrapper already exists or not):

$("#source").wrap('<div id="destination" />')
// or
$(".source").wrapAll('<div id="destination" />')

---

It sounds promising. However, when I was trying to do $("[id^=row]").wrapAll("<fieldset></fieldset>") on multiple nested structure like this:

<div id="row1">
    <label>Name</label>
    <input ...>
</div>

It correctly wraps those <div>...</div> and <input>...</input> BUT SOMEHOW LEAVES OUT the <label>...</label>. So I ended up use the explicit $("row1").append("#a_predefined_fieldset") instead. So, YMMV.

Answer 4

You can use following code to move source to destination

 jQuery("#source")
       .detach()
       .appendTo('#destination');

try working codepen

function move() {
 jQuery("#source")
   .detach()
   .appendTo('#destination');
}

#source{
  background-color:red;
  color: #ffffff;
  display:inline-block;
  padding:35px;
}
#destination{
  background-color:blue;
  color: #ffffff;
  display:inline-block;
  padding:50px;
}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="source">
I am source
</div>

<div id="destination">
I am destination
</div>

<button onclick="move();">Move</button>

Answer 5

If you want a quick demo and more details about how you move elements, try this link:

http://html-tuts.com/move-div-in-another-div-with-jquery

---

Here is a short example:

To move ABOVE an element:

$('.whatToMove').insertBefore('.whereToMove');

To move AFTER an element:

$('.whatToMove').insertAfter('.whereToMove');

To move inside an element, ABOVE ALL elements inside that container:

$('.whatToMove').prependTo('.whereToMove');

To move inside an element, AFTER ALL elements inside that container:

$('.whatToMove').appendTo('.whereToMove');

Answer 6

I noticed huge memory leak & performance difference between insertAfter & after or insertBefore & before .. If you have tons of DOM elements, or you need to use after() or before() inside a MouseMove event, the browser memory will probably increase and next operations will run really slow. The solution I've just experienced is to use inserBefore instead before() and insertAfter instead after().