Question

yes, agree that I should have figured this out from the doc, but no – I could not 🙁

<div id="jalla">
    <span>
        <span class="ui-btn-text">
            I need this text
            <span class="ui-collapsible-heading-status">
                click to collapse contents
            </span>
        </span>
    <span>
</div>

How to simply select (and update) the text “I need this text”. This is one of the things I’ve tried:

notWorking = $('.ui-btn-text').text();

Answer 1

Sometimes jQuery is not the best answer. In this case the HTML DOM makes it easier.

var span = document.querySelector('.ui-btn-text'); // first item with this class
var text = span.childNodes[0];                     // an actual text node
text.nodeValue = "Changed!"                        // done!

Seen in action: http://jsfiddle.net/C7Q6K/

Edit: For older browsers, you could use jQuery to get the span itself:

var span = $('.ui-btn-text')[0];  // get the DOM element, not the jQuery object
span.childNodes[0].nodeValue = "Changed!";