Question

When an AJAX call returns html, is it possible to use jQuery to alter the contents of the response string? If so, how does one go about doing that?

EDIT:

This question is directed at editing the response before writing it to the page

Answer 1

Well that depends on how you request the data. If you have $.ajax etc, then you can do the necessary modifications in the success handler. I assume since you don’t understand jQuery very well, that you are using $.load() to load the data, in which case it’s easiest to replace it with

$.get('/somecode.php', function(data) {
    data = $(data);

    // Find and remove all anchor tags for example
    data.find('a').remove();
    $('#target-id').append(data);
});

Or if you don’t want to create a jQuery object, you can easily do something like

$.get('/somecode.php', function(data) {
    // Replace all strings "foo" with "bar" for example
    data = data.replace('foo', 'bar');

    // Manually append it to DOM or do whatever you want with it
    $('#target-id').append(data);
});