Question

$("div:contains(' 1434')").parent().addClass('date');

class is added to ALL divs. I know, class/id would help but the html is tag soup and I can do nothing about it. Is there any way to restrict the match to just the element that contains the text directly?

Answer 1

You can use has to get the parent elements, and not to get the innermost elements:

var d = $('div:contains(" 1434")');
var p = d.has(d);
d.not(p).parent().addClass('border');

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/Guffa/JFHjG/