How can I erase all inline styles with javascript and leave only the styles specified in the css style sheet?

$('div').attr('style', '');

or

$('div').removeAttr('style'); (From Andres's Answer)

To make this a little smaller, try this:

$('div[style]').removeAttr('style');

This should speed it up a little because it checks that the divs have the style attribute.

Either way, this might take a little while to process if you have a large amount of divs, so you might want to consider other methods than javascript.

Plain JavaScript:

You don't need jQuery to do something trivial like this. Just use the .removeAttribute() method.

Assuming you are just targeting a single element, you can easily use the following: (example)

document.querySelector('#target').removeAttribute('style');

If you are targeting multiple elements, just loop through the selected collection of elements: (example)

var target = document.querySelectorAll('div');
Array.prototype.forEach.call(target, function(element){
    element.removeAttribute('style');
});

Array.prototype.forEach() - IE9 and above / .querySelectorAll() - IE 8 (partial) IE9 and above.

$('div').removeAttr('style');

I was using the $('div').attr('style', ''); technique and it wasn't working in IE8.

I outputted the style attribute using alert() and it was not stripping out inline styles.

.removeAttr ended up doing the trick in IE8.

This can be accomplished in two steps:

1: select the element you want to change by either tagname, id, class etc.

var element = document.getElementsByTagName('h2')[0];

2. remove the style attribute

element.removeAttribute('style');