jQuery string to DOM without DOM insertion

Question

I have a textarea with the following content (innerHTML):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

To prepare the content for DOM parsing with jQuery I do the following (temp is just a div):

$('#temp').append(input.val());

console.log($('#temp').html());

As pointed out at jQuery object from complete HTML document, the head, body, html and doctype tags are gone:

<meta charset="utf-8">
<title></title>

So is there any other way not to append to the DOM and still get DOM elements to work with? Iframe may be a last resort but that would be ugly.

you can just have them in a variable, or even store them using data — ifaour
– ifaour, Commented Mar 16, 2011 at 17:48
@DADU What changes do you want to make on that HTML string? Can you give some examples? — Šime Vidas
– Šime Vidas, Commented Mar 16, 2011 at 17:52
@DADU jQuery cannot parse HTML, HEAD, BODY and DOCTYPE elements. Therefore, you cannot use jQuery's HTML parsing abilities in your case. What you need is a script that can parse a full HTML string into a document fragment object. I am not aware of such a script. — Šime Vidas
– Šime Vidas, Commented Mar 16, 2011 at 18:28
@DADU Check out this article: developer.mozilla.org/en/Code_snippets/HTML_to_DOM — Šime Vidas
– Šime Vidas, Commented Mar 16, 2011 at 18:59

Robin Maben · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-09 05:49:30Z

4

You could do this..

 $(input.val()).find('your-selector')

Or, you could pass it as context..

$('your-selector', $(input.val()))

answered Aug 26, 2011 at 9:15

Robin Maben

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