jQuery() not finding elements in jQuery.parseHTML() result

You need to create a DOM element to append the results of .parseHTML() first so that it creates a DOM tree before jQuery can traverse it and find div#app-container.

var tempDom = $('<output>').append($.parseHTML(str));
var appContainer = $('#app-container', tempDom);

I used your example and got it working: http://jsfiddle.net/gEYgZ/

The .parseHTML() function seems to choke on the <script> tags, so I had to remove them.

PS. Obviously <output> is not a real HTML tag, just using it for the example

You can try this:

$($.parseHTML('<div><span id="foo">hello</span></div>')).find('#foo');

for strings that start with < you can shorter that code to just:

$('<div><span id="foo">hello</span></div>').find('#foo');