How to extract an entire element from an HTML file?

[Keith Clarke]

Folks,
Can anyone please guide me towards an LiveCode feature(s) that might provide the equivalent to the javascript jQuery library’s "jQuery(‘.class’).html();" mechanism that allows one to select an entire element’s content (including nested elements) from the page DOM?

I have experimented with using jQuery in a browser widget for this purpose but it introduces dependencies & integration complexities - and I’d prefer to work without necessitating a desktop UI to contain for the browser widget, so the code could potentially run on LC Server. 

I can see how I might build a 'roll-your-own' approach, using LiveCode’s powerful text & chunk features. This would seem to need the HTML file to be pre-processed, to iterate through the tags of the text file to both find & mark both each nesting level within elements and also ‘pair-up’ the (anonymous) closing tags.

Is there a smarter way - any HTML parsing utilities/libraries/lessons/stacks I should study?
Thanks
Keith