Question

My jQuery question I beleive is pretty simple, which is driving me insane that I can’t get it.

I have an object with a property “content”, I want to be able to take that object, manipulate the property “content” with jQuery and then overwrite the value with the new value jQuery creates.

Example:

o.content = "<div><span>hello</span></div>";
$('div', o.content).addClass('test');

At this point I want o.content to be equal to <div class='test'><span>hello</span></div>

I can not for the life of me figure out the syntax. Any help is really appreciated.

Answer 1

from the docs of the jquery function, context must be

A DOM Element, Document, or jQuery to use as context

Your context (o.content) is a string. Also, the jQuery function is not able to select the entire context, it can only select elements in that context.

Try this instead:

// make o.content a jquery element, not a string
o.content = $("<div><span>hello</span></div>");

// select on something inside the context (inside the div), not the div itself
$('span', o.content).addClass('test');

http://jsfiddle.net/JfW4Q/