Remove whitespace and line breaks between HTML elements using jQuery

Using jQuery, I'd like to remove the whitespace and line breaks between HTML tags.

var widgetHTML = '    <div id="widget">        <h2>Widget</h2><p>Hi.</p>        </div>';

Should be:

alert(widgetHTML); // <div id="widget"><h2>Widget</h2><p>Hi.</p></div>

I think the pattern I will need is:

>[\s]*<

Can this be accomplished without using regex?