Question

Working with AJAX, I encountered the following problem:
http://jsbin.com/iriquf/1

data variable is a basic representation of HTML string.

AJAX returns similar string, but with whitespaces (usually).

So, I tried to look up <h1 /> inside the retrieved AJAX data, but, without dummy element I couldn’t manage to do it.

Is there a better way than wrapping the string into a dummy element?

Answer 1

Use instead

$(data).eq(0).text()

since $(data) is a jQuery wrapped collection returning [h1, h2, p, div] you can address the h1 element with $(data).eq(0)

example jsbin: http://jsbin.com/iriquf/3/edit

Otherwise if you don’t know the index of <h1> element in your collection, make a simple loop to find it

  $(data).each(function(i, node) {
    if (node.nodeName === 'H1') {
       console.log($(this).text()); 
    }
  });

(but I strongly prefer the dummy wrapper to this method)