I have a simple string e.g.
var s = "<p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p>";
How do I convert s to a jQuery object? My objective is to remove the <p>s and </p>s. I could have done this using regex, but that's rather not recommended.
3 Answers
In the simplest form (if I am understanding correctly):
var s = "<p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p>";
var o = $(s);
var text = o.text();
Or you could use a conditional selector with a search context:
// load string as object, wrapped in an outer container to use for search context
var o = $("<div><p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p></div>");
// sets the context to only look within o; otherwise, this will return all P tags
var tags = $("P", o);
tags.each(function(){
var tag = $(this); // get a jQuery object for the tag
// do something with the contents of the tag
});
If you are parsing large amounts of HTML (for example, interpreting the results of a screen scrape), use a server-side HTML parsing library, not jQuery (tons of posts on here about HTML parsing).
2 Comments
Felix Kling
$("P", o); would not work though. It's the same as o.find('p'), meaning it looks for p-descendants of the selected elements. But the selected elements are already the p elements.
Tim M.
@FelixKling - you are absolutely right...I shouldn't write code at 2am. I will update my example, because I think a contextual selector is a useful option to have.
To get all the strings there use
var s = "<p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p>";
var result = "";
$.each($(s), function(i){
result += " " + $(this).html();
});
Comments
if you don't want regex, why don't u just:
var s = "<p>Hello World!</p><p>By Mars</p>";
s = s.replace('<p>', '').replace('</p>', '');
8 Comments
Tim M.
Unless that is exactly the expression the OP needs, a string replace will break if the tags are cased differently or there are attributes within the tag.
Mr. BeatMasta
though it changes only the first occurence =\ I would not say that s = s.replace(/<\/?p>/i, ''); is bad
Mr. BeatMasta
oh sure, if it comes to attribute parsing it's a simple regex also... s = s.replace(/<\/?p[^>]*>/i, '');
Tim M.
General consensus on SO (me included) is that using regular expressions to parse HTML is not the ideal solution: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/…. It works in simple cases, but it is very brittle even compared to something like jQuery which uses the browser's DOM or a robust server-side parser that does a character by character parse and accounts for all the possibilities which exist in valid/invalid HTML.
nnnnnn
This answer has exactly the same problem as using regex. Though I agree that if the "simple string" mentioned in the question is going to reliable follow that format then a string replace (with or without regex) would do the trick fine.
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.text()does fulfill what I needed.