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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T04:03:03+00:00

I just discovered this issue, and I wanted to run it by everyone here

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I just discovered this issue, and I wanted to run it by everyone here to make sure I wasn’t missing obvious something before I reported it.

Here is what’s causing me a problem:

html = '<html><body><div id="test">This is just a test</div></body></html>';
alert( $(html).find('#test').html() );

The alert window shows null instead of the text inside #test. HOWEVER, if I simply wrap <div id="test"> in another div element, it works properly and returns the expected, “This is just a test”.

This code works:

html = '<html><body><div><div id="test">This is just a test</div></div></body></html>';
alert( $(html).find('#test').html() );

Can someone explain to me why this would be happening? Why would the second example work but the first one not?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you debug what $(html) does, you will notice it only creates the DOM tree for the “usefull” contents, here the div#test block (it strips the html and body containers).
    Thing is, find() looks for children of the element you’re calling it from. As the root element of $(html) is already your div#test element, you will not be able to search for itself using find.

    This also explains why wrapping a “container” element makes your code work.

    EDIT
    A simple workaround would be, as the OP said, to warp the html into a container such as a div:

    var content = $('<div/>').append(html);
content.find('#test'); // returns the right div
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