Trying to select a 'body' tag from html that is returned by get() request

Question

I\'m making an ajax get call that returns me contents of html page. I\'m trying to select contents of the body tag but my selector returns an empty jquery objec

Answer 1

jQuery cannot select body of the response string, because the tag disappears when the string is converted using $().

Hence, you have to select the body from the data string in another way, such as Regular expressions. Example:

$.get(filename, function(data) {
    var body = data.replace(/^[\S\s]*]*?>/i, "")
                    .replace(/<\/body[\S\s]*$/i, "");
    //Optionally, convert the string to a jQuery object:
    body = $(body);
    console.log(body);
}))

Note: My Regular Expression assumed a wellformed HTML document, where > are correctly shown using HTML entities. If this is not the case, more advanced RegExps has to be used, such as the ones shown at this question.