Question

I have a simple string e.g.

var s = "<p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p>";

How do I convert s to a jQuery object? My objective is to remove the <p>s and </p>s. I could have done this using regex, but that’s rather not recommended.

Answer 1

In the simplest form (if I am understanding correctly):

var s = "<p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p>";
var o = $(s);
var text = o.text();

Or you could use a conditional selector with a search context:

// load string as object, wrapped in an outer container to use for search context
var o = $("<div><p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p></div>");

// sets the context to only look within o; otherwise, this will return all P tags
var tags = $("P", o); 

tags.each(function(){
    var tag = $(this); // get a jQuery object for the tag
    // do something with the contents of the tag
});

If you are parsing large amounts of HTML (for example, interpreting the results of a screen scrape), use a server-side HTML parsing library, not jQuery (tons of posts on here about HTML parsing).