Question

I am doing a simple jQuery post:

$.post('/form.html', 
            $("#form").serialize(),
            function(data, textStatus) {
//Selector for finding a field in the data
});

How do I process a selector against the variable data?

I need to look for a specific id that exists within the html
returned from the post call?

Answer 1

Is the data a block of HTML that has an HTML element with an id?

For example, say the data returned from the post looks like

"<div><p id='firstParagraph'>Some text</p><input type='hidden' id='hiddenField' value="42">Some more text</p></div>"

and say that you just want to pull out the value of the “hiddenField” element. You can do

$.post('/form.html', 
            $("#form").serialize(),
            function(data, textStatus) {
                  var hiddenValue = $("#hiddenField", $(data) ).val();
                  //hiddenValue now equals "42"
});

The $(data) part in the selector is creating a context in which the selector will operate. $("#hiddenField", $(data) ).val() is the exact equivalent of doing $(data).find("#hiddenField").val().