How to retrive value in jquery

Question

Hi All, in my js I have a var in which i have stored innerHTML. the var is having value something like

                <h2>headline</h2>
                <div>....</div>
                 ...........

Now I want to retrieve value of h2 tag..what I am doing is

           $(myvar).find("h2").text()

but its not working...what should be the exact syntax. EDIT:

                 alert(myvar)=<h2>headline</h2>
                               <div>....</div>

Thanks.

Answer 1

Find() returns a collection of nodes. Use first():

h2text = $(myvar).first("h2").text();

Answer 2

Change your HTML to something like this.

<div>
    <h2>headline</h2>
    <div>....</div>
</div>

Answer 3

generally would make more sense to wrap the contents of your var in a div as proposed by ChaosPandion.

if that's not possible, you can try this...

<script>
  var myVar = '<h2 id="test">heading</h2><div>stuff</div>';
  var jVar = $(myVar);

  alert($(jVar.get(0)).text());
</script>

Answer 4

The find method will not work for this case, because it gets the descendants of each element in the current set of matched elements (the h2 and the div in your example).

You can simply use filter (available on jQuery 1.3.2):

var myvar ="<h2>headline</h2>" +
           "<div>....</div>";

alert($(myvar).filter('h2').text()); // headline

Check an example here.