Question

I’m trying to tweak a bit jquery.chosen by harvesthq (
I was lightly editing his plugin when I met this line

searchText = this.search_field.val() === this.default_text ? "" : $('<div/>').text($.trim(this.search_field.val())).html();

I can’t figure what is doing the last part of it specially

$('<div/>')

makes no sense for me.

I assume it’s a way to convert or protect the chars entered in search_field, but didn’t find anything like this before.

Can someone explain it?

Answer 1

$('<div/>') simply creates a new <div></div> element, which harvestq then fills with the search query, leaving you with:

<div>Your search Query</div>

You can read about jQuery’s element creation in the docs