Finding an element by ID in an AJAX Response with jQuery

gloomy.penguin picture gloomy.penguin · Apr 26, 2013 · Viewed 61.5k times · Source

I need to post data to a php page and then I'd like to get the text of a certain div that is in the response but I can't seem to set things up correctly. I'm not too good with jQuery but I can usually figure things out fairly quickly... I've been at this for a minute and have tried everything I have found... I think I am just missing the right combination of stuff.

$.post("process.php", data , function (response) {  

       var w = window.open();    

       $(w.document.body).html(response); 

       console.log(typeof response); //  yeilds string 
       //create jquery object from the response html
       // var $data = $(response);   // yeilds Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: + whole html text


       var success =  $($.parseHTML(response)).find("#success"); 
       console.log('success'); 
       console.log(success);        // see screenshot
       console.log(success.text()); // yields nothing 
       console.log(success.val());  // yields undefined 
       // if (window.focus) {w.focus()}; 

 },'html');  

this is the output of console.log(success); and the red box is what I want from the response...

![this picture seems really tiny... it wasn't that tiny when I made it. I hope it is still readable][1]

and this does that:

var success =  $(response).find("#success"); 
console.log('success'); 
console.log(success);        // yeilds Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: + whole html text in red

Response is...

<html><head>
   <style>

      div.totals {
          font-family:calibri; font-size:.9em;  display:inline-block; 
          border-width: 2px;  border-style: solid; border-color: #FFD324; 
          background-color: #FAF5D7; color: #514721; 
          width: 500px; 
          }

      div.error_invalid {
         font-family:calibri; font-size:.9em;  display:inline-block; 
         border-width: 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: #9999CC; 
         background-color: #EEEEFF; color: #7979B8; 
     }

    </style>
    </head>
    <body>
    <div class="totals">Total new rows added: 0 out of 0<br/></div>
    <br/><br/>
    <div class="totals">Total updated rows: 0 out of 0 <br/></div>

    <div id="success">true</div>
    </body></html> 

And I have tried removing the style part and I added in the html, head and body tags in hope that it would help.... meaning, I have the same issues if the response only consists of the three divs.

Answer

Kevin B picture Kevin B · Apr 26, 2013

Notice how all of the elements are on the same level? You need to use .filter() to narrow down the current selection to a single element in that selection, .find() will instead look at the descendants of the current selection.

var success =  $($.parseHTML(response)).filter("#success"); 
console.log(success); // div#success