jQuery $('#myLink').text("UpdateValue") appending text, not overwriting?

Question

Hi Guys

I'm having difficulty replacing the text of a link with new text.

I have the following line

$('#myLink').text("UpdateValue");

This used to work before until I made a change to fix something that should have never been broken.. and now this is appending text & not replacing it.

Can somebody please confirm that it should replace the existing text, and not append the text to the existing text? Or am I going nuts??!!

Thanks

(Crazy) Dave

Answer 1

See this comment from http://api.jquery.com/text/:

-- QUOTE --

One quirk for anyone else experiencing this:

<label id="myLabel" />
$("#myLabel").text("newText");

Will continue to append the string newText instead of replacing it. You need to specify the label as:

<label id="myLabel"></label>

Then it will correctly replace the text.

-- END QUOTE --

Does this apply to your code?

Answer 2

It was a PEBKAC error.

a careless copy & paste resulted in the following being pasted into a UserControl:

<a id="lnkShowClipboard" class="ClipboardLink" href="#">

note the absence of </a>

For whatever reason the browser tried to complete the unfinished HTML in its own way & whatever way that was, jQuery didn't agree with it.

Thanks guys

Dave