Question

The number of divs is variable, but they all share a parent container:

<div>
    <span><br/></span>
    Lorem Ipsum
</div>
<div>
    <!-- need a span here -->
    Lorem Ipsum
</div>
<div>
    <span><br/></span>
    Lorem Ipsum
</div>
<div>
    <!-- need a span here -->
    Lorem Ipsum
</div>
<div>
    <span><br/></span>
    Lorem Ipsum
</div>

How do I prepend a span tag to all the divs which don’t have one. All the spans will be the same, they just have a line break so later on I can call text() on the parent and those will be converted into \n‘s so the grouped content will show up nicely in an email where enctype="text/plain".

Answer 1

$('div').filter(function(){
    return !$(this).children(':first').is('span');
}).prepend('<span><br/></span>');

Working demo – http://jsfiddle.net/ShankarSangoli/snJhY/