"but I can't quite get my head around how to use those methods" The docs:
http://docs.jquery.com/Manipulation/replaceWith http://docs.jquery.com/Manipulation/replaceAll would be the place to understand those methods, which just reading the first few lines of each "Replaces the elements matched by the specified selector with the matched elements" "Replaces all matched elements with the specified HTML or DOM elements" makes it pretty clear they are not for simple text replace... $('#TextAreaID').val($('#DivID').html().replace("<br />", "")); jQuery is not the answer for everything, sometimes simple JavaScript (which deep down jQuery is using anyways) is the solution
