Question

How would loop through HTML stored in a variable for ‘ul’ tags? This is what I have so far but the alert() don’t even trigger, Im a bit lost…

var data = 'HTML';
$('ul', data).each(function(i,v) {
    var theTag = v.tagName;
    var theElement = $(v);
    var theValue = theElement.html();
    alert(theTag+'\n'+theElement+'\n'+theValue);
});

Thanks

Answer 1

You’re trying to use the “selector, context” form of the $() call:

jQuery( selector [, context] )
selector A string containing a selector expression
context A DOM Element, Document, or jQuery to use as context

A string of HTML doesn’t match any of the things that context is supposed to be so jQuery doesn’t know what to do with your arguments and makes the wrong guess.

You probably want to do it like this:

$(data).filter('ul').each(function(i,v) {
    //...
});

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/ambiguous/gxGB8/

Or, if you don‘t know at what level the <ul> elements will be, wrap the HTML in a <div> and use find instead of filter:

$('<div>' + data + '</div>').find('ul').each(function(i, v) {
    //...
});

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/ambiguous/tM4ua/