Question

I’ve got a string of html that I get via $("#datadiv").html();. Within this data are several other elements, and what I would like to do is append some data to one of those elements.

e.g.

var data = $("#datadiv").html();
var somestring = "Some text"

then append somestring into the div #stringholder inside of data. Is this possible?

And before the question comes, no I can’t add it to the div before doing $("#datadiv").html();.

Answer 1

You can do something like this:

$(data).find("#stringholder").append(somestring);

As the html method returns a string, you need to pass it into jQuery again to create a jQuery object. You can then call find to get the element you want, and append to append the other string.

jQuery is quite happy to accept a string of HTML as an argument. It’s not just selector strings that are accepted. If you pass in a string of HTML, that fragment will be the context for further method calls.

I think you already know this, but note that this will not affect the HTML in the DOM. It will only affect the fragment produced by passing the string into jQuery.