Does jQuery strip some html elements from a string when using .html()?

I have a var that contains a full html page, including the head, html, body, etc. When I pass that string into the .html() function, jQuery strips out all those elements, such as body, html, head, etc, which I don't want.

My data var contains:

<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Then my jQuery is:

// data is a full html document string
data = $('<div/>').html(data);
// jQuery stips my document string!
alert(data.find('head').html());

I am needing to manipulate a full html page string, so that I can return what is in the element. I would like to do this with jQuery, but it seems all of the methods, append(), prepend() and html() all try to convert the string to dom elements, which remove all the other parts of a full html page.

Is there another way that I could do this? I would be fine using another method. My final goal is to find certain elements inside my string, so I figured jQuery would be best, since I am so used to it. But, if it is going to trim and remove parts of my string, I am going to have to look for another method.

Ideas?

After a few quick tests it seems do me that this behavior isn't caused by jQuery but instead by the browser.

As you can easily verify yourself (DEMO http://jsbin.com/ocupa3)

var data = "<html><head><title>Untitled Document</title></head><body><p>test</p></body></html>";
data = $('<div/>').html(data);
alert(data.html());

yields different results in different browsers

Opera 10.10

<HEAD><TITLE>Untitled Document</TITLE></HEAD><P>test</P>

FF 3.6

<title>Untitled Document</title><p>test</p>

IE6

<P>test</P>

so this has nothing to do with jQuery, It's the browsers which strip some tags when you insert a whole html string inside a div. But you would need to step through the whole jQuery code for html() to be sure. And you would need to do that for all browsers as there are several different ways jQuery tries to do it's job.

For a solution I advise you to investigate using an iframe (possibly hidden) and to set that iframe content to the html-string you have. But be aware that fiddling with iframes and changing their content programmatically isn't an easy task either. There are also different browser related quirks and timing issues involved.

Here is a solution, which will include the body, head and other attributes: mydoc = document.getElementById('NAME_OF_PREVIEW_FRAME').contentWindow.document; mydoc.write(HTML_CODE); mydoc.close();

Nope, the jQuery html function is just sending the string through to the element's innerHTML property, which is a function of the browser that tells it to parse the HTML into DOM elements and add them to the page.

Your browser doesn't work with a page as HTML data, it works with it as DOM and imports/exports HTML.

JavaScript has very good Regular Expression support. Depending on the complexity of your task, you may find this is the best way to process your data.

Does jQuery strip some html elements from a string when using .html()?

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