Creating a jQuery object from a big HTML-string

There is also a great library called cheerio designed specifically for this.

Fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server.

var cheerio = require('cheerio'),
    $ = cheerio.load('<h2 class="title">Hello world</h2>');

$('h2.title').text('Hello there!');
$('h2').addClass('welcome');

$.html();
//=> <h2 class="title welcome">Hello there!</h2>

As of jQuery 1.8 you can just use parseHtml to create your jQuery object:

var myString = "<div>Some stuff<div>Some more stuff<span id='theAnswer'>The stuff I am looking for</span></div></div>";
var $jQueryObject = $($.parseHTML(myString));

I've created a JSFidle that demonstrates this: http://jsfiddle.net/MCSyr/2/

It parses the arbitrary HTML string into a jQuery object, and uses find to display the result in a div.

var jQueryObject = $('<div></div>').html( string ).children();

This creates a dummy jQuery object in which you can put the string as HTML. Then, you get the children only.

Update:

From jQuery 1.8, we can use $.parseHTML, which will parse the HTML string to an array of DOM nodes. eg:

var dom_nodes = $($.parseHTML('<div><input type="text" value="val" /></div>'));

alert( dom_nodes.find('input').val() );

DEMO

---

var string = '<div><input type="text" value="val" /></div>';

$('<div/>').html(string).contents();

DEMO

What's happening in this code:

• $('<div/>') is a fake <div> that does not exist in the DOM
• $('<div/>').html(string) appends string within that fake <div> as children
• .contents() retrieves the children of that fake <div> as a jQuery object

If you want to make .find() work then try this:

var string = '<div><input type="text" value="val" /></div>',
    object = $('<div/>').html(string).contents();

alert( object.find('input').val() );

DEMO