[jQuery] sending html via POST

[Moody]

So here's what I'd like to do:

on form submission, send some data from a form input and also a
snippet of html to a php script for further processing...

so far I have something like:

formdata = $('div#htm_snippet');

$('form').submit(function(){
    $.post(url, {snippet: formdata}, function(data){
        $('body').append(data);
    });

My php script at the moment just reads the $_POST variable and spits
it back out, but all it returns is
[object Object]

so where am I going wrong?

--thanks --