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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T07:29:30+00:00

I saw this in some code: $(<p/>).append(<div>something</div>).appendTo(body); and noticed that it automatically closed the

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I saw this in some code: 

$("<p/>").append("<div>something</div>").appendTo("body");

and noticed that it automatically closed the p tag in the generated HTML :

<p><div>something</div></p>

I’ve never seen the selector syntax $("<p/>") before. Is this mistake (and Chrome is just guessing what it should be) or is this a feature of jQuery’s selector syntax?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The $ function is heavily overloaded, even having two functionalities for strings. If the string is a CSS selector, it will return an object containing the matching elements from the document. If you open with <, it will create the element. jQuery is not creating a tag, however. Elements belong the DOM, tags belong to HTML, which is a serialization of the DOM.

    $("<p/>")  //Creates a p element
    .append("<div>something</div>") //inserts a child element, which is a div you created
                                    //containing the string "something"
    .appendTo("body"); //tags the newly created paragraph element, with its div child
                       //and inserts it into the DOM as a child of the body element.

    When you serialize the document, you will wind up with:

    <body><p><div>something</div></p></body>

    which shows each element containing its children.

    If your markup looks like this: <p/><div>something</div>, then the p and div elements are siblings. That would happen if they were appended to the same parent:

    //Use add to create a new element and add it to the jQuery collection object
//instead of appending it as a child to the p element.
$("<p/>").add("<div>something</div>").appendTo("body");
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