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What is the best practice for parsing remote content with jQuery?

Asked 2009-06-23T20:10:57.013
37

Following a jQuery ajax call to retrieve an entire XHTML document, what is the best way to select specific elements from the resulting string? Perhaps there is a library or plugin that solves this issue?

jQuery can only select XHTML elements that exist in a string if they're normally allowed in a div in the W3C specification; therefore, I'm curious about selecting things like <title>, <script>, and <style>.

According to the jQuery documentation:

http://docs.jquery.com/Core/jQuery#htmlownerDocument

The HTML string cannot contain elements that are invalid within a div, such as html, head, body, or title elements.

Therefore, since we have established that jQuery does not provide a way to do this, how would I select these elements? As an example, if you can show me how to select the remote page's title, that would be perfect!

Thanks, Pete

jquery html-parsing
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If you wanted to find the value of specifically named fields (i.e. the inputs in a form) something like this would find them for you:

var fields = ["firstname","surname", ...."foo"];

function findFields(form, fields) {
  var form = $(form);
  fields.forEach(function(field) {
    var val = form.find("[name="+field+"]").val();
    ....
answered 2009-06-23T20:58:50.880

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