Line breaks in jQuery ajax html callback cause errors

Question

I am returning a large chunk of HTML from an $.ajax call. The string coming from PHP has two line breaks at the beginning, e.g.

$data = \"

<         


        

Answer 1

My HTML strings did not have any top-level text nodes, or so I thought... I found the issue was just extra whitespace. This has worked for me, and feels better than filtering out the empty nodes later:

$($.parseHTML($.trim(html_string)))

Answer 2

The problem seems to be caused by the text node in the collection you can filter it out with .filter('*')

var $html = $($.parseHTML(data)).filter('*');