I'm using jquery and have an entire html page stored in var page
var page = '<html>...<div id="start">......</div><!-- start -->....</html>';
How can I extract only the section that starts with <div id="start"> all the way to after the end tag </div><!-- start --> such that my output is
<div id="start">......</div><!-- start -->
$(page).find('#start').html();
$(page) around like that... You'll want to save a "copy" of that if you plan on searching within it very often. var $page = $(page); Otherwise you're going to create/destroy multiple copies of the DOM representation... Also, if you want to work with it in jQuery, you won't need the .html() -- i.e. $page.find("#start").appendTo("#target");if it's valid html, it would be easiest to just let the browser do it for you. Something like this would do the trick:
var page = '<html><head><title>foo</title><body><div id="stuff"><div id="start">blah<span>fff</span></div></div></body></head></html>';
var start_div = $('#start', page).parent();
alert( start_div.html() )
You can see this example in action at jsFiddle.
[edit] as @Nick pointed out above, this would probably not include the html comment at the end of the div. It also might not work in all browsers -- I don't know -- you should test it. Post back and let us know.
This should do it:
var result = $(page).find('#start')[0].outerHTML;
regex. or the lazy way (which I don't recommend but is quick..) would be to create a hidden DIV, throw it in the div and do a selector for it
$('#myNewDiv').next('#start').html();
var start = page.match(/(<div id="start">.*?<!-- start -->)/m)[1];
An appropriate regular expression will get you what you are looking for. Try using a line like this:
var start = page.match(/(<div id="start">[\s\S]*?<\!-- start -->)/)[1];
This uses JavaScript's match method to return an array of matches from your page string, and puts the first parenthetized sub-match (in this case, your #start tag and the following comment), into start.
Here's a demo that shows this method working: http://jsfiddle.net/Ender/mphUj/
